Cannot boot… no space

When you boot up do you get an option that has "recovery mode" near the end of the line or do you get the menu that says "Try Ubuntu without installing anything"? If you can get to recovery mode you might find a few options worth doing before trying to continue with the normal boot up

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

A live cd is used to try ubuntu you cant install updates because its not actually installed on the computer. Install ubuntu using the live session on the usb and then the updates will work.

Hope that helps
Shane

If it is really acting just exactly like a LiveCd then you should be able to store a "persistent image" somewhere, usually onto the usb device itself but temporarily on the hard-drive should be possible.

Good luck with this,
Regards from
Tom :)

I don't get the "recovery mode" option

My changes have been saved the last few times I have rebooted and I successfully installed some other programs so I don't think that that is the problem.

Oh, I looked at the “Live-CD-Recovery” page on the community help page but I’m not sure where to do “ctrl+alt+F1” as that is what is instructed in the “Update Failure” section.

lol, please give me a url-link to that page lol. I should have already read it but i haven't. I would guess that you're supposed to press it just after the bios stage but possibly as late as the grub boot menu stage.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCdRecovery

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCdRecovery

Thanks. Looks good but i see what you mean about it being unclear when to pres Ctrl Alt F1, i assume it's about when the menu pops up. It's about the same timing as other distros give a boot options command line. I was thinking much earlier before but i think it's got to be around when the Cd gives you a menu and the top option is "Try Ubuntu without any changes" (or something like that)

Good luck with this
Regards from
Tom :)

However it also looks like you could just bootup the Cd, choose the "Try Ubuntu without making changes" and when you get to a working desktop then go up to the top taskbar and click on

Applications - Accessories - Terminal

and copy&paste the commands into there. I think the important thing is getting to a command-line rather than where the command-line is called from. I'm not certain at all but i think 2Gb might be just too small for Ubuntu and it might be worth trying Xubuntu instead
http://www.xubuntu.org/get
there's only a few differences but it does have access to the same repositories as Ubuntu so it's quite possible to build it up to the same system quite quickly. There are other distros that are more designed for that kind of space. My favourite at the moment would be Wolvix but i can't decide between the beta1 and the Hunter varieties. The beta1 is very bleeding edge but Hunter is smaller and faster.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wolvix
Also TinyCore is a revolutionary new linux but starts very minimalist and needs a lot of building up and at the moment it's not really bleeding-edge in it's repos.

With Wolvix you could get to a command-line and issue the same commands except it doesn't have a sudo command so you would hve to "su" at the beginning and then close the terminal console at the end.

Hope something in here helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/installation-guide/i386/boot-usb-files.html