How can I convert my debian machine to Fedora?

[Bret Hughes]

On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 19:38, Ken Young wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>    I'm trying to get Fedora running on an MVME 2700 single board computer.
> This little board has a 750 PowerPC processor.   I've got Debian 3.1
> running happily atop the 2.6.11.7 kernel.   It runs like a champ, but I'd
> like to try running Fedora instead of Debian.   This single board computer
> (we've actually got ~35 of them) has no CDROM drive, and I had to do
> quite a bit of horsing around with the kernel configuration to get it
> to boot anyway (via NFS), so there's no way for me to just boot off of the
> iso image CDROMs and install Fedora normally.   Is there any way I can
> install from the CDROM images (which, of course, I can mount
> with the "-o loop" option) without booting from the CDROMs?   Is
> there a script somewhere that will install a minimal set of RPMs
> somewhere in my files system, so that I can later mount that area as root?
> Is there any way to do a network install without first booting off a
> CDROM?

While not familiar with debian, I have done countless no media installs
with various hardware configs.  You should be able to boot the install
kernel and initrd using your bootloader and walk through the install. 
Once the install is done Fedora leaves a kickstart config with the info
needed to replicate the install.

A glance at the specs does not show a network bootable ethernet but you
can boot the install from the install kernel.

Since you have linux running already, with FC4t2 you can copy vmlinuz
and initrd.img from the install cd /images/pxeboot to a bootable
location and setup grub or whatever to boot them.  
These are the same files as used in the boot.iso but saves the work
getting to them.

I typically place all the files on my installation server and do http
installs but you can of course do nfs installs with just the isos in an
exportable dir.

HTH

Bret