My FC5 install experience

[nathan bullock]

Here are just some comments about how my installation experience went.

On a second computer on the local network I:

Downloaded the 5 i386 CDs using bittorrent. The experience was much
nicer that how I normally have downloaded the iso cds in the past.

Burnt the first cd as my boot CD, then I mounted all 5 cds using:
mount -o loop -t iso9660 <isofilename> <mountpoint>

Pointed apache at these five isos so that all the contents of the 5
CDs were available at http://192.168.1.1/iso/disc[1-5]/...


On the computer that I was installing FC5.
Booted from disc1. At the prompt typed "linux askmethod", then chose
http and pointed it at http://192.168.1.1/iso

?? Two slight oddities at this point:
 - At this point it said something like "Local installation media
found", this was a little disconcerting since I thought it was still
going to boot from the CD. This message could probably be a little
clearer.
 - It also asks if you want to test your CDs. Why? You aren't
installing from CD?

After I picked all the appropriate settings it starts the install by
formatting my hard drive then promptly crashing. A dialog came up and
I was able to find out that it couldn't find
http://192.168.1.1/iso/disc1/Fedora/RPMS/gjdoc-0.27-3.1.i386.rpm. That
was because this file is actually on Disc2.

I was able to fix this with apache by doing:
RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc1/Fedora/RPMS/gjdoc-0.7.7-3.1.i386.rpm 
/iso/disc2/Fedora/RPMS/gjdoc-0.7.7-3.1.i386.rpm

On trying the install again it died again, this time on a different
file. This happened on a sequence of about four files then I decided
to copy all the rpms into one directory on my other machine and did:

                RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc1/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
                RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc2/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
                RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc3/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
                RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc4/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
                RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc5/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1

After that the installation went smoothly.

And one question to finish off this email:

I want to do the http install but instead of burning the first disc to
a cd I would like to copy just a subset of that first CD to a USB key.
Can I do this? Which files would I need to put onto the USB key?

I also want to say thank you to everyone who helps with Fedora Core.
So far FC5 is looking pretty nice.

Nathan Bullock