Another anaconda noloader change to document for F17: must specify repo= when doing direct kernel boot (e.g. PXE)

[Adam Williamson]

So I thought of one more big F17 change that should go in the release
notes and/or install guide, when it comes to installation.

There are a few use cases for doing a 'direct boot' of the Fedora
installer: that is, you don't actually boot from any release medium, but
you boot the installer kernel/initrd directly, manually. The most
obvious case is a PXE install.

In F16, you really _only_ needed to specify the kernel and initrd
location, and the install would work - kernel/initrd got you stage1, and
stage1 got you stage2. With noloader, this is no longer the case: when
you're doing a direct kernel boot, you need to tell it where to find
'stage2'. In other words: you have to pass repo= or stage2= (or
inst.repo= or inst.stage2=, as it's now preferred), pointing to a
repository. If you want to get just the stage2 image from one server but
then the installation packages from some other server, you have to use
stage2= : repo= should only be used if the server you're pointing to
contains everything needed for the install (both the stage2 image _and_
all the packages you want to install). Note that stage2= still expects
to see a 'repository' tree, you can't just pass the path direct to a
squashfs.img file (which is how stage2= worked when it previously
existed in F15 and earlier).

label linux
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img

(or something like that), you need:

label linux
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img
repo=http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/17/x86_64/os/

or:

label linux
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img stage2=http://my.internal.server/17/x86_64/os/

(or any other valid mirror).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net