How to install Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS 32-bit

Recent versions of the Ubuntu operating system tend to avoid admitting that a 32-bit variant of the distribution exists. Yet for many use cases the 32-bit variant is highly desirable. Don’t worry, it exists and is supported. You can get the 32-bit network-based installer in two ways:

• The official way:
  1. Go to the Ubuntu official web site,
  2. Choose Downloads › Alternative downloads,
  3. Navigate to “Download the network installer for 18.04 LTS”,
  4. Select “i386”, and
  5. Get the network-based installer image, mini.iso.
• The direct way:
  1. Go to http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic,
  2. Navigate to main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot, and
  3. Get the network-based installer image, mini.iso.

The network-based installer works almost exactly like the ordinary text-based installed, with the following differences:

• The computer on which the operating system is to be installed must be connected to the internet, obviously.
• In order to install supplementary software in the installation environment, you must first download it. For example, to install parted, you must first use wget to get it from the web:

  POOL=http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main 
  wget $POOL/p/parted/parted-udeb_3.2-20_i386.udeb

The network-based installed is not limited to installing the Server edition of the operating system; you can use it to install any flavor or edition, with the advantage that the installed operating system is fully up-to-date, of course, the software packages being downloaded fresh from the repository.