floppy install

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hello All,

I am starting to get a small feel for the FC2 Linux os with many 
differences from my old Mandrake 10.0 distro and I must say that I like 
what I have seen so far. In as much, I will be re-formatting my machine 
to remove the MDK and put in the FC2 code.

I have seen that I can use a boot.iso burned onto a cdrom to install 
Fedora, but I was wondering what provisions were there for booting from 
a floppy and then installing over the net, NFS, hard drive, http, etc... ?

Seems that if FC2 only supports bootable CDROM systems then it would be 
hard to place on some older machines or did I miss something?

Thanks All and have a good day,
Lonnie

[G.Wolfe Woodbury]

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 09:07:27PM -0400, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I am starting to get a small feel for the FC2 Linux os with many 
> differences from my old Mandrake 10.0 distro and I must say that I like 
> what I have seen so far. In as much, I will be re-formatting my machine 
> to remove the MDK and put in the FC2 code.
>
> I have seen that I can use a boot.iso burned onto a cdrom to install 
> Fedora, but I was wondering what provisions were there for booting from 
> a floppy and then installing over the net, NFS, hard drive, http, etc... ?
>
> Seems that if FC2 only supports bootable CDROM systems then it would be 
> hard to place on some older machines or did I miss something?

No, you didn't miss anything.  The kernel for FC2 is too big to fit on a
1.44MiB floppy along with a reasonable initrd image for booting.

[Lonnie Cumberland]

What about the possibility of having a multi-floppy version of the 
boot.iso in that older machines would be able to take advantage of 
Fedora as well?

I'm not sure how to split up the image though, but I think that it 
should be possible.

worth investigating?

Well, just my small input on what I see is a small short-fall of the system.

Thanks again,
Lonnie

Gregory Woodbury wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 09:07:27PM -0400, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> > Hello All,
> >
> > I am starting to get a small feel for the FC2 Linux os with many 
> > differences from my old Mandrake 10.0 distro and I must say that I like 
> > what I have seen so far. In as much, I will be re-formatting my machine 
> > to remove the MDK and put in the FC2 code.
> >
> > I have seen that I can use a boot.iso burned onto a cdrom to install 
> > Fedora, but I was wondering what provisions were there for booting from 
> > a floppy and then installing over the net, NFS, hard drive, http, etc... ?
> >
> > Seems that if FC2 only supports bootable CDROM systems then it would be 
> > hard to place on some older machines or did I miss something?
>
> No, you didn't miss anything.  The kernel for FC2 is too big to fit on a
> 1.44MiB floppy along with a reasonable initrd image for booting.

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 09:54:41PM -0400, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> What about the possibility of having a multi-floppy version of the 
> boot.iso in that older machines would be able to take advantage of 
> Fedora as well?

Assuming you have a CD-ROM drive then you only need enough to boot that
CD-ROM images.
> worth investigating?

Probably
> Well, just my small input on what I see is a small short-fall of the system.

There is a howto on installing Fedora without either a Floppy or CDROM which
may also be helpful especially if you have a network:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~colohan/docs/fedora_upgrade.html

[Mogens Kjaer]

Alan Cox wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 09:54:41PM -0400, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> > What about the possibility of having a multi-floppy version of the 
> > boot.iso in that older machines would be able to take advantage of 
> > Fedora as well?
>
> Assuming you have a CD-ROM drive then you only need enough to boot that
> CD-ROM images.
> > worth investigating?

If you have a floppy drive and a CDROM on a machine
where the BIOS is too old to boot FC2, you can use
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html

I've used the version from Debian, in
sarge-i386-netinst.iso /install/sbm.bin

Copy it to a floppy, boot from it, select
the CDROM, and it will continue to load
FC2 from the CDROM.

This worked for FC2 and FreeBSD.

Mogens

[Féliciano Matias]

Le jeu 09/09/2004 à 03:07, Lonnie Cumberland a écrit :
> Hello All,
>
> I am starting to get a small feel for the FC2 Linux os with many 
> differences from my old Mandrake 10.0 distro and I must say that I like 
> what I have seen so far. In as much, I will be re-formatting my machine 
> to remove the MDK and put in the FC2 code.
>
> I have seen that I can use a boot.iso burned onto a cdrom to install 
> Fedora, but I was wondering what provisions were there for booting from 
> a floppy and then installing over the net, NFS, hard drive, http, etc... ?

It's "easy" to install FC2.
You need a way to load vmlinuz and initrd.img. These files are in
/isolinux of CD1.

Most common options can be found in the same directory (isolinux.cfg and
*.msg files). askmethod parameter provide the ability to install with
NFS/FTP/HTTP and hard drive method.

For example, copy vmlinuz and initrd.img in the hard drive, then use a
floppy with grub and load vmlinuz/initrd.img :
    title Fedore Core 3 _not_T2 (Install)
        	root(hd0,0)
                kernel /vmlinuz ramdisk_size=8192 askmethod
                initrd /initrd.img

You can use "Smart Boot Manager"
http://btmgr.webframe.org/index.php3 :
        Booting from CD-ROM
                Smart BootManager supports booting from almost all kinds
                of IDE ATAPI CD-ROM
> Seems that if FC2 only supports bootable CDROM systems then it would be 
> hard to place on some older machines or did I miss something?
>
> Thanks All and have a good day,
> Lonnie