[CentOS] CentOS-5.5 Live CD & netinstall

Sat Apr 9 02:04:11 UTC 2011
William Hooper <whooperhsd at gmail.com>

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:
> Phil Schaffner wrote:
>
>>> Forgive me if I've missed it mentioned, but it looks like the option
>>> is only being removed from the LiveCD.  Using the netinstall.iso is
>>> still available and would be a more efficient way of doing network
>>> installs anyway (9.5M vs 685M).
>>
>> Precisely.
>
> 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.

>>> Unless things have changed since I messed with network installs (which
>>> is has been a while), all you really need is some way to boot the
>>> kernel and initrd files.  It doesn't matter if you start with grub,
>>> lilo, syslinux, etc.
>
> This isn't as easy as you say, as the RHEL instructions illustrate:
> <http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-
> US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Installation_Guide/>.

All I see there are instructions for the various methods of booting a
kernel and initrd files from different media (or via PXE).  As I said,
if you can get the device to boot off the kernel you specify that is
all you need, no special sauce required.

>> Still works - can just copy vmlinuz and initrd.img from the
>> images/pxeboot/ or isolinux/ directories and add a GRUB (or whatever
>> bootloader) stanza to boot them.
>
> So you believe this newbie who is confused by NFS
> is going to follow that advice?

I didn't make the above statement, but I expect a newbie will probably
have or will obtain a working optical drive.

On the other hand, knowing how to create a linux boot media is
probably a good lesson to learn.  Newbies don't become experts by
magic, they do it by learning new skills.

-- 
William Hooper