Member Avatar for cneilp09

I'm trying to install Ubuntu to a PC. It's an HP pavilion xt919. an old one given to me by my aunt after i helped her move. it has windows ME installed on it. at startup, i can tell that something has (i'm not sure what, whether it be malware, or virus/worm etc.) crippled the system at some point in time. No worries really, about that- i'd like to wipe out w/me and install ubuntu. i already threw an image disk of ubuntu, tried to install it over w/me, to little avail. ubuntu allowed me to test the problem pc on its capabilities to support ubuntu and to success. this pc runs on an intel celeron 800 MHz proc with 128 mRAM i think. Just from eying, i think it should be able to support the new OS. but i can't get w/ME OFF. i've done the control settings, tried to find an uninstall for windows ME, but nothing. anyway, i'll keep playing around, but i would so greatly appreciate any insights. stuff like this, from what i know, typically only needs someone to glance over one's shoulder and say, "hey, you missed a semi colon right there" and the problem is fixed. i assume i'm not doing something that is fairly simple. anyway again, thank you for any info.

cneilp09

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Dani AI

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Brief, practical follow‑up that complements the earlier replies from and . The shortlist below focuses on the most common next steps after a fresh install on older consumer hardware: quick hardware/driver checks, getting a wired or wireless interface up, and small tweaks to keep a low‑RAM machine usable.

Diagnostic commands (live session or installed system):

ip link show
sudo lshw -C network
lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 net
dmesg | grep -i -E 'eth|firmware|wlan|wifi'

If the device appears but no kernel driver is shown, a firmware package or alternate driver is required. If an interface exists but has no IP, the DHCP client or a temporary static address will show whether the link and routing work.

Bring up networking and test DHCP / static IP:

sudo ip link set dev eth0 up
sudo dhclient -v eth0

# static fallback
sudo ip addr add 192.168.1.50/24 dev eth0
sudo ip route add default via 192.168.1.1
ping -c 4 8.8.8.8

Wireless-specific checks and missing‑firmware notes:

rfkill list
iwconfig
sudo iwlist scan

A missing firmware message in dmesg usually means downloading the vendor firmware package on another machine and installing it offline. Very old wireless chips sometimes require legacy solutions (ndiswrapper) when no native Linux driver exists.

Low‑RAM and partitioning tips: use the live media’s GParted to create a fresh msdos partition table if the installer struggles. Create a small swapfile to help responsiveness:

sudo fallocate -l 512M /swapfile || sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=512
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

For very constrained systems, prefer a lightweight spin (Lubuntu/Xfce or specialized minimal distros) and disable unneeded background services to keep the machine usable.

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Member Avatar for caperjack

go to this site and get a win98 bootdisk image and create a win98 Floppy bootdisk and run fdisk to format the drive ,you don't need to use the ME one
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm
This site will take you step by step in using fdisk ,after you create the partition and format the hdd.boot to your ubuntu disk agin and try installagain .
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/fdisk.htm

Member Avatar for cneilp09

hey man, i appreciate it.
i got it working about thirty minutes after i posted that thread. not sure what happened really, but i turned the pc off for a few minutes with the ubuntu disk in the cd tray and powered it back up and it went through the installation. ubuntu works fine, now i'm just working on getting it online. thank you for your input.

neil

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