Thanks to zmjjmz’s note about the inxtaller script, I managed to glob together something of a variation that installs Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix to a hard drive. It’s not ideal, but it works.

I’ve adjusted it slightly and I’ll include a revision when I rebuild the system to omit ubiquity, which will probably happen as soon as I finish this post. 😉 It’ll take a little while to test and tweak, but I have a feeling this will be a valid solution for machines that can run the present version as a live CD. Of course, on a very old machine, a live CD probably isn’t even a possibility, so this installer script is still probably useless.

If you want to jump to the head of the line, here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the current version of the script into the Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix live environment
2. Edit the script with Beaver or gtkedit or nano or whatever, and comment out or delete lines 68 through 74, which close the script if they don’t find the INX system name.

After that you can run it with sudo sh ./inxtaller, and in an amount of time inversely proportional to your system speed, you should get a full-blown Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix system … with a few minor glitches:

• First, any sudo call is going to act funny, because the inxtaller didn’t write out the /etc/hosts file quite right. Just add your system name to the list of aliases in /etc/hosts, and that funny message will stop appearing.
• Second, your /boot/grub/menu.lst file has been jury-rigged by the inxtaller script, so you’ll need to accept the package maintainer’s version when you update the system. Don’t freak out; it just means you’re accepting the default version instead of the one that was written by the inxtaller script.
• The system is going to call itself “INX,” which is another something I’ve plucking out in the “official” version that will accompany the next ISO.
• Depending on the hardware, the xorg.conf file might not work quite right. Mine tells me I have problems with my screen selection, which is nonsense. But X doesn’t start on the first try, so just reconfigure it with sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. After that, everybody is happy. And that’s the way we want it, right? 🙂

Let me know if you run into any other issues; I can’t troubleshoot against every hardware profile out there, but I’d be interested to see how it works on actual, physical old hardware, and not just emulators. I’ve tested it against my 550Mhz Thinkpad, and the results were promising.

But if you can spare an installation on a 300Mhz K6-2, I’d be delighted to hear how it went. 😉