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For the heck of it (and because I wanted to see if it was possible) I booted to the Slack13 DVD to see if I would be able to install from an online source. I was actually surprised that I could.
Anyway, my question is: Why can I only select the A series to install from an online source? Does it have to do with bandwidth considerations? I'm curious for if I wanted to install -current to begin with instead of just upgrading to it.
Trouble is, I don't want to have to download all the packages. Just let it install from the net. If that makes any sense.
How/what exactly did you do, to discover that you could install (only) the /a series from an online source? Did you actually install the /a series by this method? If so, perhaps you would need to repeat whatever you did, for each of the entire series.
Strictly speaking, the default pkgtools included with Slackware do not support net-installation. "Tukaani Pkgtools" does support something like this sort of installation method, but I still suspect the packages will actually need to be downloaded-- an "on-the-fly" installation still may not exist (if it does, I'm listening, as it would be 'interesting', and I have not personally tried Tukaani yet).
Tukaani Pkgtools might be in /extra but if not, it's easily locatable with Google. Have a look at that and see if it will do what you want.
I found a previous post on here about the "usb and pxe installers" directory on the DVD and decided to try some of it out.
So, first thing is I booted to the DVD, accepted default kernel, and default keyboard. Ran "network" to initialize the network card. Ran setup (at this time, there is no hard disk in the new computer -- I hope to change that in the near future) and chose "Source" to choose where I installed from. I selected the option (second from the bottom, if I remember right) to install from FTP/HTTP source. I then allowed it to set up DHCP and put in the server (in this case, I used http://slackware.cs.utah.edu) and then path (/pub/slackware/slackware-13.0) setup then proceeded to download PACKAGES.TXT and processed some 980-something packages and presented me with the normal series selection page with only one item on it: series a. PACKAGES.TXT has more than that, obviously, but it didn't give me the opportunity to select them.
WoW! We should employ you in the "video tutorial making" department -- that's great!
PS - Not sure why it only offered the /a series -- maybe you didn't select the 'full install' or whatever exact selection of series you wanted, back at the beginning?
Anyhow, I had never used that method before, but it definitely looks like a nice way to install using a pre-existing DVD or CD that one has, except you don't end up with the actual DVD when it's done (though you could easily make one from the downloaded tree, provided you do actually *download* all the packages, as opposed to "installing them on the fly and deleting any remains").
Nice, thanks.
Sasha
Last edited by GrapefruiTgirl; 03-19-2010 at 12:22 AM.
What you see is what I saw. I captured every menu. :P There was no way to choose "full" or "custom" -- I'm guessing that it assumes you're an expert since you're using something other than the original disc so it doesn't give that option.
But yeah. I have no idea why.. I was sorta hoping someone here would have an answer... :P
EDIT: I am also wondering if perhaps it had to do with the fact that it had nowhere but RAM to install to -- that if it had decent install space that it would go ahead and work completely.
EDIT: I am also wondering if perhaps it had to do with the fact that it had nowhere but RAM to install to -- that if it had decent install space that it would go ahead and work completely.
Something makes me think that this is not it -- you probably would get some sort of actual real errors, had it begun installing and there was no actual HDD selected or even installed in the machine, to install to -- but as I mentioned, this is rather new to me as well, so I may as well not guess about it..
I suspect that another experienced slacker(s) who've used that method, will have more info on this, so ... Patience & time will tell!
I've only used install over NFS share, which worked fine, but http/ftp should work as well. However, it should be noted that this is *meant* for a *local* ftp/http server (ie one on your network) and installing directly from a mirror is discouraged as this uses up significant bandwidth. From Slackware-HOWTO:
Code:
The network installation feature is intended primarily to facilitate
installing to many machines on a local network. Please don't use it to
bog down the Slackware mirror sites.
However, it should work regardless. 985 packages is exactly how many there are in PACKAGES.TXT in the *top-level* directory. I am assuming if you went ahead and installed the a/ series it would be all of them. You aren't supposed to have to specify the slackware-13.0/slackware/ directory but you could try that I suppose...clearly something isn't working properly, and I believe it is getting the wrong path.
This is probably not much help, but it sounds familiar.
I do some installs on my LAN via PXE. When I set it up for the first time (a couple of years ago using Slackware 12.1), I initially had a problem that I could boot, set up the network and get all the way to package selection, but I would only see the first set of packages (probably the 'a' section but I cannot say for certain).
I remember clearly finding that it was a path problem in my source network address spec. I am less certain what the exact path was but it seems to me that the intuitive path was one directory too deep, as if the installer wanted to add 'slackware' to the end of whatever I told it to use, and when I removed that level it worked fine.
Think of it as pointing to the root directory of the DVD, expecting to find the remaining tree below what you tell it.
EDIT:
After seeing T3Sliders post it occurs to me that maybe it was the other way around - that is, I assumed that I did not need to add 'slackware' but it turned out that I did... in any event, I recall that it was opposite of what I expected, and as there are a limited number of choices just try them both/all.
I've tried both ./slackware-13.0/slackware and ./slackware-13.0 with the same result. The PACKAGES.TXT file provides package paths with ./slackware/a (or ./slackware/kde), so I figured using ./slackware would cause package location issues. But either way it only displays the a series. And now that I think about it, is that to cut down on bandwidth? That was my initial thought.
Thanks anyway!
Btw, how do you do a PXE boot anyway? That's a network boot, right? I haven't really seen many tutorials on how to do that.
Uhhh... I installed slackware over http onto a virtual guest machine where the host was also the http host. I wouldn't recommend doing this as processing all the directories took for ever. BUT, it did work. I was able to do a full and custom install from tag files. Maybe the installer prevents full over internet connections some how? Or maybe it failed to configure the network and decided to only install from what you had on the CD?
Maybe when it was processing the directories, it lost connection to the source due to too many connections or some other reason and the installer could only process the /a series.
I did two successful installs from a USB stick using a Slackware mirror. I had no problems selecting and installing the packages. One thing I did run into was that post-installation I wasn't able to connect to the internet. I didn't have time to troubleshoot it but I am sure it would something easy to fix.
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