Fall short of the RAM requirements to launch the installer and install Ubunti.

Hello pete:

according to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
If your system has less than 192 MB of system memory, use the Alternate Installation CD.
because the minimum recomended system requirements for Installation of ubuntu are:

500 MHz x86 processor

192 MB of system memory (RAM)

8 GB of disk space

Graphics card capable of 1024x768 resolution

Sound card

A network or Internet connection

now in your case the system memory is low.. For this...

Possible fixes:
1.Downloading the alternate CD and installing..
http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/ubuntu-releases/hardy/ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso
I doubt if this works out since your system is low on ram..

2.There are a couple things that work sometimes with older hardware.

First thing I would check is the Bios setting for the Intel graphics video controller. There is usually a place for shared video memory which might be like 1024 K or 1 MB. Set this as high as it will go, usually 4096 K or 4 MB. That has gotten my old computer running ubuntu for me..

Another thing to try when the boot choices come up, push F6 and add these to the end of the line so it will look like:

....quiet splash noapic acpi=off irqpoll

which can work CD Live. Sometimes just one of the three last settings is needed. If by chance you decide to do an install, and it does, then those options can be added to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst (where l is lower case L)

3. The best solution is:
Since your system is old,try out xubuntu and then after installing xubuntu you can install ubuntu updates perfect for low end systems... xubuntu system requirements are:
To run the Desktop CD (LiveCD + Install CD), you need 128 MB RAM to run or 192 MB RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only required you to have 64 MB RAM.

To install Xubuntu, you need 1.5 GB of free space on your hard disk.

Once installed, Xubuntu can run with 64 MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to use at least 128 MB RAM
(Xubuntu is a light flavour of ubuntu,which comees with xfce desktop perfect for low end systems...)

Xubuntu can be downloaded from:
http://www.xubuntu.org/get
Have fun and relax,
Bhavani Shankar.

Thankyou ever-so-much for your quick reply however im still having difficulties. Ive downloaded Xubuntu and placed it on disk however even now when i click on the option to install within windows an error box pops up saying i require 256mb of ram and re-booting with ubuntu disc in the drive seems to have no effect..Any ideas? Thanks, Pete

OK try an older version maybe ubuntu 7.10 or the alternate CD

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/gutsy/release/

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/hardy/release/

Please look at the bottom of the page and download the iso and burn it at lower speed say 4x and verify the md5 sums

Bit info about MD5 sums:
With an md5 sum you can compare the contents of files. If your .iso file is defect (this can happen when you download it), it's md5sum would be different than that one on the Ubuntu server.

To calculate the md5sum of your image file, you can use a command line tool like http://www.md5summer.org/download.html for Windows (on Ubuntu/xubuntu it's the 'md5sum' command). Then compare the calculated value with the ones in this list http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/7.10/release/MD5SUMS So if you have the xubuntu-7.10-alternate-i386.iso, the calculated value should be 8a6e05a36ff5098ece6e3d28ad3b279a

If the file has a different md5sum than expected, I would recommend to download that iso again.

Regards

Bhavani Shankar.

pls have a look at this question and check this solves your problem:

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/30706

it works for me

Got it, thanks very much for all your help