making suse 8.1 installation cd
 

hi everyone,

i'd like to give suse 8.1 a shot so i downloaded the entire suse 8.1 from an ftp server yesterday. what i didn't realize is that i was downloading about 3 gigabytes worth of software ... the i586 directory alone is about 2.5 gb.

since it's not broken up into "cd1, cd2, cd3" how can i create an installation cd set for myself that gives me access to all the packages i need?

cheers,

rob

I would start by making yourself a boot disk from the stuff you've downloaded. If you got all the packages and stuff from Suse, then you should have what you need to do this. (I haven't done this yet so I unfortunately cannot tell you what files you need exactly). I know how to make a boot disk if your Linux is already installed (/sbin/mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 `uname -r`) but not before so hopefully someone else might know how.

After you've got your boot disk made, I'd try to tar your downloaded information and split it into smaller pieces to fit on your CDs. There's a way to do this that I read in the man pages months ago but I can't remember off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure it's the split command. man split for more information on this. If after you've tarred your 3 GB of data and it will fit on one cd, you're set. If not, try to split it and put it on 2 CDs or 3 or 4 or... Once you've got your info on CD, you should be able to use your newly made Linux boot disk to get to command line. From here you can put the split files back together and then untarr it or vice versa. You should have access to everything again. I don't know how much help this is, but hopefully it's given you some ideas.

hmmm ... interesting idea. i thought of trying something like that before, but the suse installer seems quite picky so i thought i'd try and make an install cdrom.

thanks!

rob