If your computer will boot from USB, this will probably be the easiest route for installation. Assuming you have prepared everything from Section 3.7.2, “Boot Device Selection” and Section 4.3, “Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting”, just plug your USB stick into some free USB connector and reboot the computer. The system should boot up, and unless you have used the flexible way to build the stick and not enabled it, you should be presented with a graphical boot menu (on hardware that supports it). Here you can select various installer options, or just hit Enter.

The easiest route for most people will be to use an Ubuntu CD. If you have a CD, and if your machine supports booting directly off the CD, great! Simply configure your system for booting off a CD as described in Section 3.7.2, “Boot Device Selection”, insert your CD, reboot, and proceed to the next chapter.

Note that certain CD drives may require special drivers, and thus be inaccessible in the early installation stages. If it turns out the standard way of booting off a CD doesn't work for your hardware, revisit this chapter and read about alternate kernels and installation methods which may work for you.

Even if you cannot boot from CD-ROM, you can probably install the Ubuntu system components and any packages you want from CD-ROM. Simply boot using a different medium and when it's time to install the operating system, base system, and any additional packages, point the installation system at the CD-ROM drive.

If you have problems booting, see Section 5.4, “Troubleshooting the Installation Process”.

To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in Section 4.4, “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.

If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then download everything over the network, you should download the netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux. This will allow you to repartition the hard disk from which you boot the installer, although you should do so with care.

For LILO, you will need to configure two essential things in /etc/lilo.conf:

Here is a /etc/lilo.conf example:

image=/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
       label=newinstall
       initrd=/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

For more details, refer to the initrd(4) and lilo.conf(5) man pages. Now run lilo and reboot.

The procedure for GRUB1 is quite similar. Locate your menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ directory (or sometimes /boot/boot/grub/) and add an entry for the installer, for example (assuming /boot is on the first partition of the first disk in the system):

title  New Install
root   (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

The procedure for GRUB2 is very similar. The file is named grub.cfg instead of menu.lst. An entry for the installer would be for instance for example:

menuentry 'New Install' {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
linux /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz
}

From here on, there should be no difference between GRUB or LILO.

Booting from the network requires that you have a network connection and a TFTP network boot server (and probably also a DHCP, RARP, or BOOTP server for automatic network configuration).

The server-side setup to support network booting is described in Section 4.5, “Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting”.

There are various ways to do a TFTP boot on i386.

When the installer boots, you should be presented with a friendly graphical screen showing the Ubuntu logo and a menu:

Installer boot menu

Install
Advanced options             >
Help
Install with speech synthesis

	Note
	This graphical screen will look very slightly different depending on how your computer has booted (BIOS or UEFI), but the same options will be shown.

Depending on the installation method you are using, the “Graphical install” option may not be available.

For a normal installation, select the “Install” entry — using either the arrow keys on your keyboard or by typing the first (highlighted) letter — and press Enter to boot the installer. The “Install” entry is already selected by default.

The “Advanced options” entry gives access to a second menu that allows to boot the installer in expert mode, in rescue mode and for automated installs.

If you wish or need to add any boot parameters for either the installer or the kernel, press Tab (BIOS boot) or e (UEFI boot). This will display the boot command for the selected menu entry and allow you to edit it to suit your needs. The help screens (see below) list some common possible options. Press Enter (BIOS boot) or F10 (UEFI boot) to boot the installer with your options; pressing Esc will return you to the boot menu and undo any changes you made.

Choosing the “Help” entry will result in the first help screen being displayed which gives an overview of all available help screens. To return to the boot menu after the help screens have been displayed, type 'menu' at the boot prompt and press Enter. All help screens have a boot prompt at which the boot command can be typed:

Press F1 for the help index, or ENTER to boot:

At this boot prompt you can either just press Enter to boot the installer with default options or enter a specific boot command and, optionally, boot parameters. A number of boot parameters which might be useful can be found on the various help screens. If you do add any parameters to the boot command line, be sure to first type the boot method (the default is install) and a space before the first parameter (e.g., install fb=false).

	Note
	The keyboard is assumed to have a default American English layout at this point. This means that if your keyboard has a different (language-specific) layout, the characters that appear on the screen may be different from what you'd expect when you type parameters. Wikipedia has a schema of the US keyboard layout which can be used as a reference to find the correct keys to use.

Note

If you are using a system that has the BIOS configured to use serial console, you may not be able to see the initial graphical splash screen upon booting the installer; you may even not see the boot menu. The same can happen if you are installing the system via a remote management device that provides a text interface to the VGA console. Examples of these devices include the text console of Compaq's “integrated Lights Out” (iLO) and HP's “Integrated Remote Assistant” (IRA). To bypass the graphical boot screen you can either blindly press Esc to get a text boot prompt, or (equally blindly) press “H” followed by Enter to select the “Help” option described above. After that your keystrokes should be echoed at the prompt. To prevent the installer from using the framebuffer for the rest of the installation, you will also want to add vga=normal fb=false to the boot prompt, as described in the help text.