[TriLUG] Network install question

Magnus magnus at trilug.org
Sat Apr 28 20:35:02 EDT 2007


Nicholas Chapel wrote:
> I'm an almost total Linux n00b, and am facing a bit of a dilemma with 
> regard to an installation.  I'm attempting to install Linux on a 
> slightly vintage PC which has a CD-ROM drive, but cannot read DVDs. I 
> want to install a distro (CentOS 6) that I've downloaded and burned onto 
> a bootable DVD, and I would really rather not download and burn six 
> separate CD images of the same distro for the sake of this one computer. 
> I do have a bootable CD of Damn Small Linux, however, that will boot 
> just fine on the old PC. Would it be possible for me to put the DVD in 
> my desktop machine, share it via NFS, boot the old computer using my DSL 
> CD, mount the NFS share, and manually invoke the installer? I can figure 
> out how to create and mount the NFS share, but how would I invoke the 
> installation via that share? And if this /*/isn't* possible (or isn't 
> the easiest way to go about the task), how would I best achieve the 
> installation without ripping a DVD drive out of another computer and 
> slapping it in the old box?  Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Disc 1 has a mini CDROM iso image that you can burn to a CD.  It has 
enough of an installer on it to get on the network and grab the rest of 
the install image off of ftp, http, or nfs server.  You can mount the 
DVD .iso on your workstation as a loopback filesystem and then export 
the mountpoint via ftp, http, or nfs for your older machine to attach to.

BTW - CentOS 6?  5 just came out this month.  Maybe that's what you're 
referring to?

-- 
"Showing off is the fool's idea of glory." - Bruce Lee's observations of 
people at TriLUG meetings who won't shut up and let the guest speaker talk



More information about the TriLUG mailing list