Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

Choosing How to Install Fedora

Fedora can be installed in a variety of ways, using different techniques and hardware. Most users install Fedora by booting to the installation directly from a CD or DVD. Other options include the following:

> Booting to an installation and installing software over a network or even via the Internet, using FTP or HTTP protocols

> Booting to an installation and installing software from an NFS-mounted hard drive

How you choose to install (and use) Fedora depends on your system's hardware, networking capabilities, corporate information service policy, or personal preference. The following sections describe the issues surrounding each of these types of installation.

Installing from CD or DVD

Most PCs' BIOSes support booting directly from a CD or DVD drive, and offer the capability to set a specific order of devices (such as floppy, hard drive, CD-ROM, or USB) to search for bootable software. Turn on your PC, set its BIOS if required (usually accessed by pressing a function or Del key after powering on); then insert the Fedora installation disc, and boot to install Fedora.

To use this installation method, your computer must support booting from your optical drive, and the drive itself must be recognizable by the Linux kernel. You can verify this by checking your BIOS and then booting your PC.

The file boot.iso is a 8.5MB CD-ROM image found under the images directory on the Fedora DVD. The image can be burned onto a blank CD, and supports booting to a network install. This is a convenient way to boot to a network install on a PC with a bootable CD-ROM drive, but no installed floppy drive, or when you don't want to use multiple floppies during an install requiring driver disks.

You burn the image onto optical media by using the wodim command. For example, copy the file to your hard drive, insert a blank CD-R into your CD-RW drive, and then use a command line like so:

# wodim -v speed=40 dev=0,0,0 -data -eject boot.iso

This example creates a bootable CD-ROM, and then ejects the new CD-ROM after writing the image. The speed (40, in this example) depends on the capabilities of your CD-writing device. The device numbers are those returned by running cdrecord with its scanbus option, like so:

# wodim -scanbus

Installing Using a Network

Fedora can be installed from a local network (or even over the Internet if you have broad band access). You need access to a web, FTP, or NFS server hosting the installation pack ages. To boot to a network install, use the bootable CD-ROM created with the boot.iso boot image as described previously, or the Fedora DVD included with this book. Boot your PC with the boot floppy or, if you use CD-ROM, type linux askmethod at the boot prompt. Follow the prompts, and you will be asked to choose the type of network installation.

TIP

Just press Enter at the boot prompt if you boot to a network install by using a CD-R created with the boot.iso image. You will boot a graphical network install.

To install from an FTP location, select the network IP address assignment for your target PC, such as DHCP, or manually enter an IP address along with optional gateway IP

address and nameserver addresses. You are then asked for the FTP site name. You can enter the name or IP address of a remote FTP server hosting the Fedora release. The name of the remote directory depends on where the Fedora install files are located on the remote server.

Using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to install Fedora requires access to an FTP server (see Chapter 20, 'Remote File Serving with FTP,' to see how to set up a server and use FTP). You have to know the hostname or IP address of the server, along with the path (directory) holding the Fedora software. One way to prepare a server to host installs is to follow these steps:

1. Create a directory named Fedora under the FTP server's pub directory. The directory is usually /var/ftp/pub on a Linux server.

2. Create a directory named base and a directory named RPMS underneath the Fedora directory.

3. Copy or download all RPM packages included with Fedora into the pub/Fedora/RPMS directory.

4. Copy all original base files (comps.rpm, comps.xml, hdlist, hdlist2, hdstg2.img, netstg2.img, stage2.img, TRANS.TBL) from the DVD's base directory into the pub/Fedora/base directory.

Using this approach, enter pub when asked for the name of the remote directory holding the Fedora install software.

Installing Fedora from a remotely mounted Network File System (NFS) is similar to a hard drive installation, but requires access to an NFS server. You need access permission, a permitted IP address or hostname for your computer, the hostname or IP address of the NFS server, and the path to the Fedora software. See Chapter 14, 'Networking,' for more information about NFS and network addressing.

To install Fedora with HTTP, you need the hostname or IP address of the remote web server, along with the directory containing Fedora's software. See Chapter 17, 'Apache Web Server Management,' to see how to set up a web server.

NOTE

See Chapter 20 for details on how to configure the vsftpd FTP server. Chapter 17 provides information on how to set up and configure Apache for web service. See Chapter 19, 'File and Print,' for Samba settings. Note that you can have your server perform all three duties.

Step-by-Step Installation

This section provides a basic step-by-step installation of Fedora from the DVD included with this book. There are many different ways to proceed with an install, and the installer can provide a graphical or text-based interface in a variety of modes.

NOTE

If you are using the Live CD, we assume that you have double-clicked the Install icon on the desktop. Pick up the instructions below at the Release Notes point.