I do not normally get much opportunity to participate in new releases and have not had a chance to install the 14 release candidates until now.

But I will have a partition available later today if I grab it, with the constraint that I must install via PXE.

Offhand I cannot think of any problems with that, although I have only ever set up a PXE source from the DVD iso.

Is anyone aware of any special considerations for setting up a PXE installer from a current mirror?

I have not tried it yet - just wanted to ask while the thought was in my brain cell...

Just type "pxesetup" instead of "setup" at time of install and when asked for the source indicate one which includes packages for Slackware-current (possibly a local mirror), I think that's about it. You can first put the installer on an USB stick as indicated in /usb-and-pxe-installer/.

The detailed how-to is here.

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What you are referring to is the PXE server which is part of the Slackware installer. To make it work, you will need to burn a full DVD of Slackware (-current), or of course create a bootable USB installer which contains all packages.

You would need a second PC which you boot from the DVD and then run "pxesetup". The second computer is the one you are going to install Slackware on. That will be the PXE client. If you let it do a PXE boot, it will find the Slackware PXE server and the rest will be trivial.

I have added a copy of that blog article in the wiki of our new Slackware Documentation Project: http://docs.slackware.com/slackwarexe_install

Eric

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Thanks Didier and Eric.

At this time I do not have anything available that can actually boot from a DVD or USB stick, but I have an older box that I have configured as my PXE server, so think I should be able to just add it as a new option. I don't expect any surprises but this is the first time I have done it this way (i.e., from -current instead of from mounted DVD ISO image).

I am using Eric's mirror script to download the -current tree at the moment - probably take a few hours at current speed.

I have also loaded the links into my browser and will begin reading when my tea is done.

Thanks - I'll let you know...

Now booting the slackware-current installer via PXE!

The full tree has not finished downloacing, but I grabbed the kernels, initrd and isolinux first and configured it into my existing PXE server. No surprises at all.

I booted my target system, configured the network and mounted the (still downloading) NFS source tree... all looks good, I can't wait!

My PXE server is using the pxelinux.0 from slackware 12.1 but that shouldn't matter as far as I can tell.

Now serving via PXE:

Slackware 12.1
Slackware 13.37
Slackware-current
GParted

OK, that was not a problem! I did not expect it to be but had never installed from current this way before.

I'll mark this solved and for completeness add the following notes...

I now have a -current mirror set up as an option on my PXE server - scripted synch using Eric's mirror script.

I originally set up my PXE source according to Eric's notes in the 12.1 usb-and-pxe-installers/README_PXE.txt in order to install to a laptop with a failed DVD drive. Since that time I have modified it to allow other choices, and simply added the -current kernels and tree as boot/nfs options. This is what I had in mind to do but had been unsure if -current required any special handling.

I then installed to my target box without problems! It is an older laptop with i915 graphics and looks like I will get to enjoy the vesa/modeset/xorg setup like everyone else - but I have seen enough threads here on LQ that I should be able to sort that out.

Anyway - PXE'd, installed and now I can stay -current for the first time!