Installing Linux!

Kevin Fries Kevin at hcico.com
Fri Jan 7 19:44:09 UTC 2005


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Jean wrote:
|
|
|
| Dear All,
|
| I am having trouble installing Linux (red hat) on my 200MHZ pentium. I
| download the files (FC3-i386-disc1.iso, FC3-i386-disc2.iso,
| FC3-i386-disc3.iso, FC3-i386-disc4.iso) and burn 4 cds. Putting Disc1 in
| the pc and boot up from it. A list of regular message is shown on screen
| and the pc stopped at (Verifying DMI Pool Data .... Boot from ATAPI
| CD-ROM). There is a prompt but the keyboard is non functional.
|
| My next question to you is that should I burn all four CDs with the
| md5sum file.

Jean, I have a Dell XP200 we keep in the office as a kiosk for visitors.
~ It runs FC3 with KDE (XP look and feel) just fine once I bumped the
memory up to 192MB.  So you should be fine from a hardware standpoint.

However, like you, I could not for the life of me get FC3 to install
from CD.  Like you, what I did was put the CD in the tray and reboot.  I
would get to a similar point, and it would tell me that there was no CD,
despite the fact that the test it was running was stored on that same CD
that did not exist.  Seems a little bit like circular logic to me.

What I did to install (worked perfectly):
First I installed an old copy of Linux that would install correctly.  I
tried several and don't remember which one worked correctly (probably
Redhat or Mandrake).  The important part was getting any Linux on the
system that booted from Grub.

I then placed the CD's iso images on another machine and exported the
directory via NFS.  You can also place them on the same hard drive, but
the one I was dealing with was quite small and I wanted to preserve it,
so it went on another machine.  You can also share the directory via FTP
or HTTP if you need the files available via a Windows machine.

Inside the iso image, I copied the /isolinux folder to under my /boot on
the little machine.

I then added a new entry in the grub.conf of the system to boot the new
kernel.  Simply copy the entry that it boots from now, and change the
entries for the files to point to the new versions in /boot/isolinux.
Also change the default entry to point to your new entry.

Reboot.  When it asks, tell Fedora how to find the iso images.  In my
case that would be telling it to do a NFS install, I give it the name/IP
of the server and the name of the directory plus any required name and
password (after all it is an NFS mount).  Fedora will see the directory,
see the iso images, and begin installing.

Now that the system is installed, it sees the CD just fine.  There is
just something in the isolinux kernel used for install that does not see
it, so you just have to work around it until then.

Good Luck

- --
Kevin Fries
Network Administrator
Hydrologic Consultants, Inc of Colorado
(303) 969-8033    FAX: (303) 969-8357
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