Slackware Install Over SFTP

Hi all,

Is it possible to install Slackware over an SFTP connection (i.e. the slackware setup files are on a remote server on my network) ?

Thanks,
edenning

Is it possible? yes. Does the Slackware installer support it? no. The Slackware installer needs local access to the installation files. The only "remote" method that is supported is NFS, which is mounted locally to ultimately provide local access. If you have the space available, you could manually transfer the files yourself before running setup. However, the problem you're going to run into is that the bootdisk doesn't have SSH, sftp, scp or even the SSL libraries available. Although you could add it, I suppose.

slackware looks relatively less comprehensive in this case... as far as i could remember, there are a number of distos. that are able to install via ftp on-the-fly such as redhat.
perhaps not allowing this would save bandwidth.

i was one of them who suffered becoz i needed to bittorrent the .iso to install slackware in my old laptop and sort of wasted two cd-r. (plus i need to fetch my pcmcia cdrom from my closet + buying an adapter for it just to install slackware)

i was too lazy to read the doc to use my mac to setup a nfs tho...

thanks alot guys, its not necessary that install slackware that way but if i make any headway on this i'll let yall know.

thx,
edenning

I installed Slack on my laptop a few days ago, when the DVD drive had decided it didn't like my discs. They were still readable on my desktop, so I copied the contents to a samba share and installed from that.

What I did was to make floppies for the A and N packages. Everything else was useless junk, as far as a remote install is concerned. With A and N installed, I was able to boot the system, and used smbmount to set it up. It was a simple matter to finish the installation from that point. It shouldn't be too hard to use a different remote mounting system from samba to do the same thing.

Glad I stumbled across this post!

Silly newbie question for you, KillerBob - how would I go about installing the A series and the N series of slack from floppies? I'm trying to do an NFS install (from a Windows 98 machine), but so far not having much luck. The Slackware setup program seems to mount the remote directory, but then can't find it when it goes to install the files a few minutes later.

I'm going to try a few other NFS server programs, but failing that thought I would install the A series and N series and go from there...

Would really appreciate a few suggestions.

Cheers!

In my case, I created the bootdisk from the CD image, and copied the two sets (A and N) over disk by disk to a directory on the drive.

The advantage of the Slack install is that you end up at a command prompt, and can mount the floppy to copy packages to the hard drive from a sneakernet.

knowmad, make certain that you set the directory correctly. The installer doesn't verify it and will fail if it's wrong. Set the path to the directory that contains the a, ap, and etc folders, not the top level directory. Meaning that if you copied the CD to your Windows hard drive at C:/slackware and you are sharing that folder, the correct path would be /slackware/slackware

Thanks for the advice, KillerBob and DaHammer. Adjusted the path for the NFS install, and the whole thing worked like a charm. Slack 10 is now alive and kicking on my old laptop!

Now, to configure and tweak...