[CentOS] CentOS-5.5 Live CD & netinstall

Sat Apr 9 00:56:17 UTC 2011
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>

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.

You really need to consider that people may not be
in exactly the same position as yourself.

>> 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/>.

> 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?

>> The issues you saw with grub being installed on the USB stick instead
>> of the HDD are a bigger concern in my book.  I wonder if you you have
>> better luck installing GRUB on the HDD MBR, booting from the HDD and
>> using grub to load the kernel and initrd off the USB stick.
> 
> That is a known issue and is addressed in the Wiki article:
> http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland