Hello,

I have a DVD with a FC4 bootable.
A friend of mine wants to boot and install it on his laptop but unfortunatly , he has no DVD player, only a CD player and a 3.5 disk player.
I also have a laptop which has a DVD player.
We both have an ethernet card and a crossover cable.

How one should do to start from my DVD player, via the network?
I was thinking of making a bootable cd with a ramdisk containing his ethernet card driver, an NFS client, and also maybe the loop module??

Then he could mount the dvd remotely and continue the boot process on my DVD player through the network.

Is this possible and do you have ideas on what we have to do to achive this?

Thanks in advance

Some quick pointers:
[list=1][*]Create a bootable CD using the information in the /isolinux directory that should be on the DVD if it looks anything like a Redhat DVD[*] [*]Setup a FTP or NFS server on your machine, and make sure that the mounted DVD is available on the network (as a NFS export or as a link in in the ftp server's pub directory)[*] Boot the other PC using the bootable CD you created, and make sure you select network install and depending on whether you setup NFS or FTP, choose the correct install type.[/list=1]
You will have to work with static IP addresses because I do not think you have a DHCP server running.

Assign one PC this IP for instance: 192.168.0.1 with netmask 255.255.255.0; and the other 192.168.0.2 with netmask 255.255.255.0. Thi way they will be able to talk to each other. You do not need a gateway, but if the installer insists on having one, enter the IP address of the other PC.

Hope this helps a little

Eric

Thank you very much, we'll give it a try.
I didn't think about the net install, I was going in more complex methods...

I have an additional question for the same problem. I have not enough knowledge on the boot process and CD/DVD images...

On my machine with DVD player; I boot with a live CD (we tried R.I.P).
We have access to /isolinux and the complete DVD mounted in /mnt/xxx
In this dir, there is the vmlinuz file.

The big question:
How could I launch this kernel and go on with the booting process. With a virtual machine? A simpler way maybe?
Don't bother giving me everything in detail, its more a theorical method I need.
I'm not sure its that easy to execute a new kernel on a running kernel

Thanks again

This is the kind of thing xen is designed to do. To use Xen you need to boot from a kernel that supports xen (I think these are available as part of Fedora Core 4) and then the Linux kernel you try to run on top of that (ie. the one on your DVD) also needs to support Xen.