Here's the thing: I want to install Ultimate Edition, any version, on a somewhat older laptop, a Panasonic Toughbook. It's equipped with a CD-ROM drive and a 3.5 Floppy drive. I have successfully installed Ubuntu 10.04 - the most recent as far as I can tell - and it seems to be running fine. But I want some version of Ultimate Edition, at least to give it a shot, preferably 2.6 Gamers (as the most recent Gamers).
Now as I'm sure everybody knows, Ultimate Edition images are always DVD images, but this laptop does not HAVE a DVD drive, at least not built in. I have an external DVD drive to connect via USB, but the bios doesn't support booting from anything connected by USB. Hard drive, CD or Floppy are the only options.
Now, I've burnt several versions of Ultimate Edition since I was converted, so I have a few discs to choose from. All of them have a folder called Install, whose Readme file says the following:
The file `sbm.bin' that is available in this directory may be useful to you if you are not able to directly boot the first CD because your BIOS may be too old and may not support ISOLINUX.
Then, instead of booting on the CD directly, you create a Smart Boot Manager floppy image by using the sbm.bin disk image. You can create this floppy with rawrite (under DOS) or with dd (under Linux). Now you can boot on this floppy disk and it will detect your CDROM and let you boot on it bypassing any BIOS limitation.
Sounds perfect! Not sure if it'll support booting from a USB DVD drive, but I'll give it a shot! But I don't have any machine running DOS so I can't try rawrite, and I'm finding very little information on how to use dd, specifically how to specify to unpack the bin file and "burn" it to a disk. I tried "dd --help", but I don't see any Destination option. As far as I can tell, this smb.bin file is the floppy version of an ISO, it's a floppy image. Although I have a few computers at my disposal, including a desktop dual booting Windows Vista and Ultimate Edition 2.3 Gamers, and several Live Bootable discs of Ultimate Edition, since this Toughbook is the only computer with a floppy drive, it's the only computer which can make this magical disk. So all that matters is what systems I can get on it and what they can do. Oh, and the Toughbook doesn't have wireless networking, so I can't connect to my home network to connect to the Internet, at least not easily... If necessary I can awkwardly work where I have my router.
Now, poking around these forums to try to get the info I need, I came across one thread saying that Ubuntu 9.10 and up - so presumably also Ultimate Edition 2.4 and up - does not see or mount floppy drives! Since I couldn't find any way to get Ubuntu 10.04 to mount the disc drive, this explains the other problem I had. Hence, this forum. I figure 2.3 is my limit (which is funny, since it was the current version when I started using Ultimate Edition), since it's based on 9.04. Assuming I want to be able to still use the floppy drive, which since it's there I do.
The thing is, nothing in any Ubuntu or Ultimate Edition I've tried even recognizes the BIN extension! Everything else I can think of involves trying a CD/DVD burning software to try to find one which supports BIN, but I'm sure they won't even have the option to set the floppy as the destination. So making this disc using a graphical interface seems out of the question. All that's left to me is the command line, I just need to know how to write the command. There are no examples in the help text to help me figure it out. Oh, and later on in the Readme file mentions the command bmconf to somehow use SBM, but I also find no info on how to use that, either.
Note that although I'm full of questions here, I'm quite the computer expert usually, and I've been using computers heavily since the DOS days, and I've been missing DOS for quite some time. So, I'm comfortable with trying to fool around in Terminal. I'm just still somewhat new to Ubuntu/Linux, especially the more advanced commands and such.
Obviously the first step is to install Ubuntu 9.04 over my Ubuntu 10.04 (or rather, to burn the install CD first, THEN install), but after that.... Can anybody help please? Searching these forums for "sbm.bin" and "floppy" come up with nothing when I'm logged in, and little but nothing useful when I wasn't (which is weird, I'd understand the reverse, threads not available to unregistered users). Thanks in advance!