How can I convert my debian machine to Fedora?

[Ken Young]

On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Bret Hughes wrote:

> 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.

Thanks very much for your quick reply.   Booting the install kernel
is precisely what I'm trying to avoid.   I've got a working kernel,
and I had to tweek quite a few parameters in the .config in
the kernel tree to build something that would work in this weird
little computer (I initially cross-compiled on an x86 workstation,
but now I can compile the kernel natively under Debian).   I
don't think I can boot the install kernel, so
what I'm trying to do is see if there's some way I can jump into the
installation process at a later step.   For example, can I manually
invoke the initrd from the CDROM after booting my kernel?   Or can
I issue commands that would be equivalent to what initrd does?
Or is there just some list of RPMs I could load into some area that
would constitute a minimal distribution of Fedora which I could
subsequently mount as root?

Thanks again for your help.

Ken