Fedora 7: Installation

It seems there are several people trying to get Fedora installed on one

machine that doesn't have a DVD drive (but does have a CD drive), and

have another Linux machine around with a DVD drive or a DVD iso image.



Here are cut-to-the-chase instructions for using HTTP for a network

install and the boot.iso image on a CD as the boot media.



One machine A, the one with the DVD drive or image (these instructions

assume that this system is running FC6, but these should be easily

adapted to other distributions or releases):



1. Mount the installation image:



If the image is on DVD and was automatically mounted: find the

mountpoint and replace "/mnt/f7" with that mountpoint in all of the

following instructions



If the image is on DVD and is not automatically mounted: mkdir /mnt/f7 ;

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/f7



If the image is in an .iso file: mkdir /mnt/f7 ; mount -o loop

ISOFILE /mnt/f7



(Where ISOFILE is the name of your DVD iso image,

e.g., /tmp/Fedora-7-i386/F-7-i386-DVD.iso )



2. Burn the 'images/boot.iso' file to a CD:



If the image is on DVD:

- Get the boot.iso file: cp /mnt/f7/images/boot.iso /tmp/

- Unmount the DVD: umount /mnt/f7

- Swap the DVD for a blank CD

- Burn it: cdrecord -dao -dev=/dev/cdrom /tmp/boot.iso



If the installation image is in an .iso file:

- Insert a blank CD

- Burn it: cdrecord -dao -dev=/dev/cdrom /mnt/f7/images/boot.iso



Remove the CD now.



ALTERNATIVE: Use the images/diskboot.img file on a USB flash drive.

(Required warning: this will erase all data on your USB flash drive).

Insert the USB flash drive, check the drive ID, then issue this command:



dd if=/mnt/f7/images/diskboot.img of=/dev/sd?



Where /dev/sd? is the device name for your flash drive.



(You'll need to partition and format your USB flash drive later to get

the full capacity back: DRIVE=/dev/sd? ; dd if=/dev/zero of=$DRIVE

bs=512 count=1 ; parted $DRIVE mklabel msdos ; parted -- $DRIVE mkpart

primary fat32 1 -1 ; mkfs -t vfat ${DRIVE}1 ).





3. If the installation image is on a DVD and you burned a CD boot disk,

repeat step 1 to get the DVD mounted again.



4. Install Apache if necessary: yum install -y apache



5. Set up Apache to serve the F7 files:



ln -s /mnt/f7 /var/www/html/fedora

setenforce 0

service httpd start



The 'setenforce 0' is required because the security context of the F7

files does not permit them to be served by httpd. Tony Nelson suggests
disabling SELinux protection for httpd only (which is wise):

setsebool httpd_disable_trans on

In either case the change is temporary and will revert at the next boot.

On machine B, the one with only a CD drive and a network connection to

machine A:


1. Boot from the CD (or USB flash drive).


2. Select the language and keyboard when prompted.


3. Select the HTTP install method.


4. Configure your networking (usually this means disabling the IPV6
option, then selecting DHCP or manually entering the network
parameters).


5. Enter the server IP address (not name) and the directory name
"fedora".


6. Enjoy the rest of the normal installation process.


I think these instructions are reasonably complete and accurate -- I did
this earlier this evening because my laptop's DVD drive couldn't
successfully verify several DVDs that I burned.


The installation speed for this network installation was impressive,
matching or beating the time that I'd expect from an optical disc
installation.

It's also possible to perform a network installation directly from the the Fedora mirror servers -- but they're heavily loaded right now, so it's recommended that you get a DVD image using Bittorrent and use that as your installation source instead.

Tomorrow we'll look at the tools Fedora provides for producing custom spins of the software.