On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 10:04 PM, William Hooper whooperhsd@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
In my case, at least, I would always run a Live CD before installing an OS, just to make sure it runs OK. So a person might well have a Live USB stick anyway.
This is a valid point.
What booting system does the LiveCD use after transferring it to the USB stick? Perhaps a middle ground would be to create a wiki page on how to add the netinstall kernel/initrd to your own media.
I did some testing to answer my own question. As I expected, adding the option back yourself on a USB stick is trivial (for a CD you would have to complete your own isolinux burn, so it is a little more involved, but the same basic steps). I believe most Linux bootable USB sticks use syslinux, so these steps would work with them, also.
1) Create Live USB stick as before
2) Edit the isolinux/isolinux.cfg or syslinux/syslinux.cfg on the USB stick to add a stanza to boot the installer kernel (this example taken from the 5.5 LiveCD) ====start here===== label installer menu label Network Installation kernel vminst append initrd=install.img text ====stop here=====
3) Copy the kernel/initrd images from any mirror onto the USB stick (making sure they are named the same as your stanza above): http://centos.mirror.netriplex.com/5.6/os/i386/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz -> syslinux/vminst http://centos.mirror.netriplex.com/5.6/os/i386/images/pxeboot/initrd.img -> syslinux/install.img
4) Boot to USB stick, press space to get the menu, choose whatever you labeled your stanza (in this case "Network Installation".
I believe that the installer still changes for each point release, so you would have to make sure the kernel/initrd is for the specific release you want. In fact, this would let you create a number of different stanzas so that you could boot the installers for multiple versions if you wanted to (Fedora 14, CentOS 5.6, and CentOS 6.0 for example).