Install base system

Boot the Ubuntu installation medium. When asked, choose the "Try Ubuntu" option and open a terminal.

Switch to root, otherwise you'll have to type sudo all the time:

sudo su -

Enable the universe repository and install required tools:

add-apt-repository universe
apt update
apt install debootstrap arch-install-scripts

Create image partition.

lvcreate -L 10G -n noble vg_xen

Create the filesystems:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg_xen/noble

Install base system using debootstrap. Since I'm installing 24.04, use the noble identifier. You can also specify your mirror, choose one that is faster/closer to you:

debootstrap noble /mnt

The mirror will also be written to sources.list, so choose an actually good one. If you don't specify one, the default is the main repository located in US.

Prepare chroot environment

Edit /mnt/etc/apt/sources.list, add -security, -updates and -backports suites, as well as restricted and universe repositories:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-backports main restricted universe

Chroot into the installation environment:

arch-chroot /mnt

Configure the system

Update and add more necessary packages:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install --no-install-recommends linux-{,image-,headers-}generic linux-firmware initramfs-tools

This is also where you pick your kernel. I'm using GA kernel. Now install a text editor:

apt install nano

Configure your timezone, locales and keyboard layout. I use Europe/Helsinki timezone and en_US.UTF-8 locales, and a standard FI keyboard:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
dpkg-reconfigure locales
dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Set your hostname:

echo "noble" > /etc/hostname
echo "127.0.0.1 noble" >> /etc/hosts

Set up file system

We need fstab also

nano /etc/fstab

Example how it could be.

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
/dev/xvda1      /               ext4    rw,relatime     0       1

Set up users

Create your sudo user and set a password for it:

useradd -mG sudo your-user -s /bin/bash
passwd your-user

Set up networking

For most single ethernet cable setups, you can just create a configuration in /etc/netplan/01-interfaces.yaml:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enX0:
      dhcp4: true

Replace enX0 with your interface name, find it out using ip a.

Install other packages

You can install other useful packages that you need, here's what I install:

apt install at curl dmidecode ethtool gawk git gnupg htop man \
  openssh-server patch screen software-properties-common tmux zstd \
  bash-completion file command-not-found

Install a bootloader

Finally, install a bootloader of your choice. I will install GRUB:

apt install grub-pc
update-grub

If you hypervisor is older and thus not support ZSTD compression, then decompress the kernel image.

wget -O /usr/local/sbin/extract-vmlinux https://raw.githubusercontent.com/torvalds/linux/master/scripts/extract-vmlinux
chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/extract-vmlinux
wget -O /etc/kernel/postinst.d/decompress-kernels https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Floppe/700de5ffe6cf0842d66322873c83791a/raw/a706f42c7c01020170beb2cdac47528179c8e6aa/decompress_kernel
chmod +x /etc/kernel/postinst.d/decompress-kernels
apt install lz4 binutils

And reinstall the kernel so post hook decompresses the kernel

apt reinstall linux-image-6.8.0-31-generic

Finish

Unmount and setup as guest. Boot it up and get the IP, then SSH into the new guest.

Fine tuning

Install your keys

ssh-add -L >> .ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys

I like to see the boot logs, so remove quite splash from /etc/default/grub

update-grub

Get system information when logging.

apt install update-notifier-common landscape-common

Floppe/Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble install onto LVM partition.md