I resuscitated an old PC, one that I built from parts some years ago. Totally dead until I realised one of the RAM chips had come loose, probably during moving the machine. I guess I was not respectful enough of the Gigabyte motherboard.
I knew the DVD drive was non-functional, so I found a donor DVD-ROM drive from another relic and began to spin the install disc. Halfway through installing Windows, about when you have to put in the licence key, I realised, I didn’t need to install Windows.
I downloaded an image of Ubuntu – they asked me for money, for Linux!!! – and put it onto a handy USB key with unetbootin.
In the end, the relic wanted its slimline DVD reader back. So I wondered about getting a new DVD drive for the old boy. They can be had for about 15€. But reading and writing optical discs is likely to be an infrequent activity for this machine, so I wondered about using an Apple USB Superdrive (2.5 stars! Lots of bad reviews for being unreliable and not working well with new/old Macs). I have some lying about, for machines that are too skinny to bother with optical discs (that is, all modern Macs).
Disappointingly, although I had installed the Superdrive onto a Windows laptop before, it’s not so simple with Ubuntu. But Christian Moser has all the details. Fantastic post and work by him! The manual and the automated ways both work perfectly.
Serious Piffle 