Q about installing F10 from Live DVD

[suvayu ali]

2009/4/22 David <dgboles at comcast.net>:
> On 4/21/2009 5:10 PM, jackson byers wrote:
>
>>> if it insists on that, I wasnt prepared for it,
>>> having only sdb6 i was willing to give to f10.
>
>
>> I wrote about this the other day but I don't recall ever seeing it show up.
>
>> First: A Live-CD *does not* install separate packages. A Live-CD writes
>> itself to your hard similar to the way you burn an ISO to a CD.
>
>> It will *erase your harddisk* and then write itself exactly as it is. You
>> have no choices of anything.
>
>> You boot the CD. You are looking at the OS running from memory. You decide
>> to install it to your harddrive so you click the install icon. It formats
>> your drive and writes itself to your drive. Exactly as it is on the CD. You
>> reboot, answer a few questions and you are basically done.
>
>> And *whatever* was on the HD before is gone. Period.
>
>> The size of the CD it limited but they have put what most people would need.
>> Anything else you install from the online repos.
>
>> All of that aside I would seriously doubt that you could update a Fedora
>> Core 5 install directly to a Fedora 10 install anyway. Too many years and
>> too many changes. If you do a fresh install the has been updates since the
>> Fedora 10 Live-CD was made. Probably another CD full of them.
>
>>  David
>> ---------------
>>>It formats
>>>your drive and writes itself to your drive.
>>>Exactly as it is on the CD. You
>>>reboot, answer a few questions and you are basically done.
>
>> yes but that doesnt answer my confusion as to how it chooses
>> the hard drive or harddrive partition to write on.
>> and whether it is forcing LVM on me
>> and whether it is forcing a separate /boot partition.
>> I have two scsi disks, sda, sdb
>> I was trying to point it to my sdb6
>> it clobbered my sda1
>
>> Are you saying liveinstallcd will try to
>>  take over my either my entire sda  or my entire sdb?
>
>
> As I understand the Live-CD installs to the primary (boot) disk. That would
> be sda. It will have a / in sda1 and a swap in sda6. It will be LVM.
>

All this talk about live CDs got me thinking. If someone wants to get
something not available on the DVD (e.g. XFCE) and have their custom
setup on the local disk, the only way to upgrade is over the network
using preupgrade? Isn't that rather restrictive, specially since a lot
of the users have dual boot machines?

What would be the options if I don't have a reliable high speed
Internet connection? I am asking this as I wanted to get rid of Gnome
completely and have XFCE instead when I upgrade to F11. But going by
this, that seems unattainable. Am I missing something here?

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.