Installation from NFS. (laptop without cd-rom)

yapp · 10-18-2003, 05:14 AM

Hi LQ

My friend has a small laptop, with an 500MB disk, and we tried to install Slackware on it. Because the laptop doesn't have a CD-Rom drive, we tried to look for an FTP install (which doesn't seam to exist for Slackware). I've been able to export NFS shares at my workstation, and boot the laptop with 'tomsrtbt'. (a floppy linux distro) to mount the drive.

But how can I start the setup from the NFS share? The "setup" executable doesn't seam to exist

LNXman · 10-18-2003, 01:13 PM

I am assuming you are trying to install the latest slackware. . .

Check this link out

yapp · 10-18-2003, 08:23 PM

Thanks a lot. this looks pretty cool.

There is just one thing, and I feel a little embarrassed about it; how do I boot from these disks? Ive tried to copy the images (bare.i and install.1) to a floppy disk with the 'dd' command, but I wasn't able to boot from these disks. What am I doing wrong here?

LNXman · 10-18-2003, 09:47 PM

if you used the commands:

dd if=bare.i of=/dev/fd0
dd if=install.1 of=/dev/fd0
dd if=install.2 of=/dev/fd0
dd if=network.dsk of=/dev/fd0

Then that should be it to prepare them.

To boot, use the same order of disks as it is listed above.

Just make sure your floppies are formatted before you run the commands.

GL

yapp · 10-19-2003, 05:58 AM

Thanks a lot. I forgot to format the device, because I always assume that 'dd' will overwrite the disk anyway.

Booting from one of the disks caused the laptop to display four's in an infinite loop.