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In order to be able to update a bug I’d filed against the graphics driver on the Viglen MPC-L, beloved hardware of the Ubuntu Podcast listeners, I set about installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, nicknamed Lucid. This wasn’t as straight forward as it could have been, so here’s how I did it:

1. Downloaded the Ubuntu i386 desktop ISO.
2. Turned it into a bootable USB stick using the “Startup Disk Creator” program in System Tools.
3. Booted the MPC-L off the USB stick. (N.B. It will only boot from USB sticks inserted into the rear USB sockets.)
4. At the splash screen, selected the advanced boot options, and appended pnpbios=no noapic acpi=off to the boot options.
5. The system then booted to the text-based installer. I didn’t tell it to use this installer rather than the graphical one, it just did.
6. Followed the installer process through, noting an error about not being able to install a suitable kernel. I think this is because the Lucid kernels are compiled for i686, whereas the MPC-L is essentially an i586 CPU (AMD Geode).
7. At the end of the installation procedure, at the “reboot” prompt, I selected “Go back” and chose to start a terminal session.
8. In the terminal session I set up a chroot to install a suitable kernel:
   # mount -o bind /proc /target/proc
   # mount -o bind /dev /target/dev
   # mount -o bind /dev/pts /target/dev/pts
   # mount -o bind /sys /target/sys
   # chroot /target
9. Then I installed a kernel: apt-get install linux-386
10. Once the kernel had installed, I exited the chroot and terminal (type exit twice). This returns one to the installer menu.
11. Then I selected the reboot option from the installer menu.
12. After a reboot, the system came up just fine.

As ever it’s worth noting that running GNOME on the 400MHz CPU of the MPC-L is quite hard work, but can be done. Check out Xubuntu or Openbox for more suitable desktop environments though.

Oh, and the bug wasn’t present in Lucid.