Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 426996
need quick install guide for booting off of usb stick and installing from network
Last modified: 2007-12-29 17:37:45 EST
Greetings. I'm currently a debian person trying to install fedora over the network. I was able to find that putting diskboot.img on a usb stick, booting that up and choosing http as the package stuff would get me where I'm going. That's good. What I wasn't able to find was a way to quickly search for "network install fedora usb stick", and I think some quick documentation somewhere with the right keywords would be beneficial. Here's some stub documentation (i know it's not great, currently at my family's house trying to unbrick a laptop with a busted cdrom drive). Go to some webby place that has fedora. Download Fedora/i386/os/images/diskboot.img cat diskboot.img > /dev/sdb (or whatever the usb stick is) If you wanna use dd, be my guest. Boot up, go through some options etc, choose http as an option (because I dont normally use fedora I wasnt sure if the boot image that I had selected would boot and would give me the ability to select http as the install source). Enter the site name and link to the fedora installs up to 8/Fedora/i386/os/ Fudge the URL until it can actually download the file it wants. profit. Other than that, no complaints. The net install is running fairly slow; I was able to get 300k/s off of the site that I'm installing from and the blinken lichten hint toward something happening, but it just says "Starting install process". It would be cool if there was some way to see what it's doing aside from looking at the traffic on the wire.
During a network install, if it stays on: "Starting install process" for a long time, the thing may have stalled.
And by a long time I mean I had the thing on for 4 hours. Rebooted the machine, started the installation over, and then it spent probably less than 10 minutes on that thing.
This information appears prominently in Chapters 2, 3, and 6 of the Fedora 8 Installation Guide -- both instructions on making a bootable USB stick, and on using a network source for installation. As for the speed of installation, you may want to choose a mirror geographically close to you or which gives you generally good response time. As mentioned in Chapter 6 of the Installation Guide, you can go to our mirror list to find a mirror close to you.