We recently purchased a brand new IBM x3650 server for one of our customers. Installing Ubuntu 12.04 was painless, while trying to deploy Lucid on it was not so smooth.
This mainly because both the ethernet ports and the raid controller were not found by the standard kernel found in install ISO.
We really needed 10.04 to install Zimbra. This is the stuff to deal with:
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I350 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)
06:00.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I350 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)
06:00.2 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I350 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)
06:00.3 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I350 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)
16:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 2208 [Thunderbolt] (rev 03)
16:00.0 0104: 1000:005b (rev 03)
Since the problem was the missing module in the kernel, we hoped a more recent kernel would do. There are more recent kernels for Lucid, but how to install? debootstrap!
- boot the 12.04 installer in rescue mode
- open a shell into the installer environment
- partition with your preferred fdisk
- make filesystem on the designated partition
- mount that partition in /target (or wherever you prefeer)
- run apt-get install debootstrap
- run debootstrap –arch amd64 lucid /target http://it.archive.ubuntu.com
The installer will finish in short time, leaving you with a base system. There are plenty of docs online on how to complete your installation. What makes the difference is that you need to install linux-image-server-lts-backport-oneiric instead of the kernel package suggested by the howto. Easy, wasn’t it?