Goodnite to everyone!

I have a Compaq Armada e500 laptop but the CD ROM drive isnt working and I really want to install slackware 10.2 on it. I did some reading on installing Slackware via a NFS mount. My network consists of the compaq armada laptop connected to my dell Pc using a crossover cable. The ip addresses are as follows; Dell - 192.168.0.1 Compaq - 192.168.0.2 . My best guest is that i'm gonna have to use the CD ROM drive on the dell to carry out the installation. Can anyone please help me here. I read about creating a "network boot diskette" from a directory on the slackware cd. After doing this what "parameters" do I have to setup from there?? Can anyone plz help me! Thankz in advance!

Heres a good article but I think your going to still need a boot disk

http://www2.linuxjournal.com/article/1021

To do a network install over NFS without a CD-ROM, you will need to use the Slackware boot disks. For this operation, you are going to need 3 disks.

The first, the boot disk:

Slackware Boot Disks

For the purposes of this install, you could get away with bare.i, but as you have a laptop, you might want to give bareacpi.i a shot, as that will have ACPI support for your laptop. ACPI support is not required for installation though, so it isn't much of an issue.

Then, you will need the root disks:

Slackware Root Disks

You'll need install.1 and install.2 to get the installer going, and to do a NFS install, you will need network.dsk.

Installation over NFS is much the same as with a CD-ROM, just point it to the NFS share, and off it goes like normal.

On the server side, you will need to setup an NFS share, and then inside of that share, extract the contents of the Slackware CD. Actually, you could probably mount the ISO as a loop back and make that the share (that way you don't even need to burn a CD), or even just share the CD-ROM drive itself. Just do whatever works best for you, as long as the client can get all the files on the CD, it doesn't matter how the server is really setup.

ok, I follow this far!, but can i use my windows xp pc as a sever, so I can share the cd rom drive and use it to load the installation files??

thankz for the info so far guys!

Ah, you didn't mention that.

Microsoft offers the "Services for UNIX" package with includes an NFS client and server. Using that, you should be able to setup a suitable shared file tree.

In order to install via network, you will need 1 or 2 more disks. If your network card goes in a pcmcia slot, you will need the pcmcia.dsk disk, same directory as install.1 and install.2. You will then need the network.dsk (same location again).
Sequence -
1. Boot Disk
2. Install 1
3. Install 2
4. PCMCIA if needed (sets up pcmcia slots)
5. Network (finds network interface)
6. CFdisk or FDisk to set up partitions
7. Setup
a. setup up swap
b. setup destination
c. setup source (I believe one of the options is SMB (windows) mount)

Rich

Ok, I think I follow this far. Can I use my knoppix,slax or DSL live distro's on my dell to set up a server so that I can make available the slackware setup files from the CD to the laptop via my NFS mount?

You could if you wanted to, but I would think it would be easier to just do it from Windows.