Installing fedora while running fedora?

[Rodd Clarkson]

Using a liveCD I can install fedora on my system while running the LiveCD.

Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be a
really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to do it.


Rodd

[Michał Piotrowski]

preupgrade?

2010/12/3 Rodd Clarkson <rodd(a)clarkson.id.au&gt;:
>  Using a liveCD I can install fedora on my system while running the
> LiveCD.
>
>  Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be a
>  really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to do it.
>
>
>  Rodd
>
>  --
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Best regards,
Michal

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[Rodd Clarkson]

2010/12/3 Michał Piotrowski <mkkp4x4(a)gmail.com&gt;

>  2010/12/3 Rodd Clarkson <rodd(a)clarkson.id.au&gt;:
>  > Using a liveCD I can install fedora on my system while running the
>  LiveCD.
>  >
>  > Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be a
>  > really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to do
>  it. <https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test>
>  
>  preupgrade? 
I'm aware of preupgrade, but that's for upgrading the system you're
currently running.

I want to be able to do something like this:

I'm running Fedora12 as a MythTV system and would like to be able to install
Fedora14 onto separate (unused) partitions while I'm running F12 (to
minimize downtime).  Since this is effectively the same thing as running a
LiveCD and installing to the HDD, I'm wondering if I can do this.

I've done some more searching and wonder whether anaconda can be run with
some command line options to point at the ISO with F14 but still aren't sure
this is possible.

It would be a great feature in f15 if you could insert the DVD (or CDs) into
your running system and then run something that allowed you to install
Fedora elsewhere without having to sit looking at your system while the
installer runs.


R


Rodd

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 12:51:10PM +1100, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
>  
>  
>  I'm running Fedora12 as a MythTV system and would like to be able to install
>  Fedora14 onto separate (unused) partitions while I'm running F12 (to minimize
>  downtime). 
Hm, run what is described at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum
and your downtime is minimal.  Just check that you will not run out
of a space in /var/cache/yum.  You will need to remove few packages
beforehand as otherwise dependencies will not resolve.  For sure

rhpl
system-config-display
kudzu
control-center-extra

if you have those installed. Removing temporary cjkuni-uming-fonts,
if needed, is likely a good idea.  Do not forget to force
relabelling if you have SELinux on (and making it permissive before
you clean things up is highly advisable).

If you insist on doing that on a fresh file system then copy your
installation there, chroot, adjust fstab, mount /proc and /sys,
make sure that networking is on and do just the same what is above.
It sound like an extra work (a boot record, layout changes,
customizations to redo) but probably doable.  Maybe starting with
a copy of a LiveCD may reduce what you will need to transfer?

   Michał

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 11:55 +1100, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
>  Using a liveCD I can install fedora on my system while running the
>  LiveCD.
>  
>  Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be
>  a really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to
>  do it. 
I don't think this is explicitly supported anywhere, no. Quick idea for
a hack: set up a virtual machine but tell it you want to use a real
partition for its storage, then boot a live image in the VM and do the
install.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Jóhann B. Guðmundsson]

On 12/03/2010 12:55 AM, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
>  Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be
>
>  a really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to 
>  do it. 
No you can not.

Live cd works in that way that all the components are uncompressed and 
loaded into memory as needed from the Live CD and everything is running 
from there.

I don't particular see the usefulness in that feature care to explain 
what kind of behaviour you are looking for a bit more?

Hypothetically you could do some *partition magic* given that you had 
sufficient free storage space to over install Fedora over currently 
running system but you would still need to *reboot* to the new install 
which kinda renders it pointless that is if that was what you where 
looking for.

JBG

[Rodd Clarkson]

2010/12/3 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg(a)gmail.com&gt;

>  On 12/03/2010 12:55 AM, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
>  > Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be
>  > a really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to
>  > do it.
>
>  No you can not.
>
>  Live cd works in that way that all the components are uncompressed and
>  loaded into memory as needed from the Live CD and everything is running
>  from there.
>
>  I don't particular see the usefulness in that feature care to explain
>  what kind of behaviour you are looking for a bit more?
>
>  Hypothetically you could do some *partition magic* given that you had
>  sufficient free storage space to over install Fedora over currently
>  running system but you would still need to *reboot* to the new install
>  which kinda renders it pointless that is if that was what you where
>  looking for 

Okay, just to clear things up, I'm not trying to install Fedora in a
currently running fedora.

I'm trying to install Fedora on other partitions while still running.

While I love that you can update from one version of Fedora to the next,
it's my experience that it's not completely smooth and some things break.
For example, often getting VMWare to work (compilation issues usually) is a
hard one, and I prefer to move from one installation to a different one so
that I have something to fall back to that's known to work.

On my laptop I usually have 2 fedora installs, the one I'm moving into, and
the one I've been using already.  At the moment I've got F13 and F14.
VMware still isn't working in F14 (compilation issues) but I need VMWare for
bookkeeping, so it has to work.  However, to install F14 took about 2 hours
(with updates coming in while the installer worked) and that's 2 hours of
downtime I don't need (as I'm unable to do anything with my laptop while I'm
installing F14).  This got me to thinking that it would be great if I could
have installed F14 while still running F13.  If I could do this I'd actually
bother to (and have easy access about) use the other repos (rpmfusion and
spots firefox4 and chromium repos) while installing instead of having to do
this later.

My MythTV box works like a dog and finding time to install a second distro
is hard enough, let along finding time between shows that need taping. And
(and this is the kicker) I don't need an upgrade that goes wrong and have to
explain to my wife she can't watch TV because I upgraded distros and broke
it.  The MythTV is truly production.  So if I could install f14 (it's
currently using f12 which is EOL) while it's running I could get this done
while (literally) watching TV and then figure out the final tweaks without
having to find time to install and then update (and then do all the other
little bits and pieces).

Are these two examples good enough?

I only ask because it occurred to me that what I wanted to do was basically
what you can do in the LiveCD and it made me wonder why the installer on the
DVD had to be booted and why you couldn't run it.  I guess there are some
issues with using already mounted partitions that are shared (/home for
example) but it would be truly useful if I could put the DVD in the drive,
run something inside my running Linux distro and install it to another bit
of the harddrive (instead of having to sit by watching the installer run
software and leaving me without access to my system while it happens).


Rodd

[Adam Miller]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 08:39:34PM +1100, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
<SNIP> 
>  Okay, just to clear things up, I'm not trying to install Fedora
> in a
>  currently running fedora.
>  
>  I'm trying to install Fedora on other partitions while still running.
<SNIP>

I suggest giving febootstrap[0] a peak, I haven't actually pulled off an
install like this (mainly because I haven't had a use case but now I
kinda want to try it out) but I imagine its something that could be
accomplished. You'll need to create a filesystem by hand and mount the
other partition, but from there febootstrap should do the trick. Its not
"supported" and its somewhat round about but something about it seems
like a fun solution.

Happy hacking,
-AdamM

[0] http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap/

P.S. - febootstrap is in the official repos, so grab it via the package
manager instead of mucking around with the source ;)

[Adam Pribyl]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010, Rodd Clarkson wrote:

>  Using a liveCD I can install fedora on my system while running the
> LiveCD.
>
>  Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be a
>  really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to do it. 
It should be possible using qemu like this:
qemu -cdrom fedora-livecd*.iso -boot d -hda /dev/sdb
in this case it expects you have completely free /dev/sdb disk as this is 
the easiest way. You'll have to fix grub and booting manually.

>  Rodd 
Adam Pribyl