I picked up an MSI Wind desktop recently for $140 + $20 or so for a 2GB SO-DIMM from Frys and put it together with a SATA hard drive I had kicking around. I didn’t want to spend the money on a SATA CDROM that I would use just for the install, or bother pulling the one out of my mothers identical PC I just built for her. I did a PXE network install of Ubuntu 8.10, not choosing to install anything over base. Then I installed openssh-server and removed all input devices.

To install the ubuntu-desktop virtual package, I wanted to use apt-cdrom to allow using the iso image as a repository rather than download 500MB worth of packages.

sudo mv ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /media
sudo mkdir /media/iso
#add  "/media/ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /media/iso iso9660 user,loop 0 0" to /etc/fstab
sudo mount -a
sudo apt-cdrom add -d /media/iso -m

This turned out to be completely useless though, as there are only a few debs on the Ubuntu LiveCD. The LiveCD uses Ubiquity to install which just copies the CD to the new partition. I almost always use the alternative installer via PXE booting, so I never noticed this before.