10.3.1.1. Preparing a USB drive
To configure a USB drive for booting, download the USB boot image by selecting a mirror site from the web page http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html and going to that mirror with a web browser. Select the directory for the desired Fedora Core version number (e.g., 6 ), then the directory for your machine architecture ( i386 , PPC , or x86_64 ), then select the os directory, and then select the images subdirectory. Download the file named diskboot.img (you can also find this in the /images directory of the Fedora Core DVD or the first disc of the CD set).
The directory layout varies slightly among the mirror sites.
Once you have obtained the diskboot.img file, transfer it to your USB flash drive using a Linux system. First, insert the drive into the system; you should see an icon appear on the desktop.
This procedure will wipe out everything on your USB flash drive! Back up the drive contents before proceeding.
Use the df command to determine the drive's device name:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/main-root 30G 14G 15G 48% /
/dev/md0 251M 41M 197M 18% /boot
/dev/shm 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/main-home 14G 6.6G 7.0G 49% /home
/dev/mapper/main-var 65G 56G 8.0G 88% /var
/dev/hdb1 99M 24M 71M 26% /mnt/oldboot
/dev/hdb3 109G 75G 29G 73% /mnt/oldroot
/dev/hda6 14G 4.1G 8.5G 33% /mnt/x-root
/dev/sdb1 8.0M 6.4M 1.7M 80% /media/usbdisk1
In this case, the device name is /dev/sdb1 . Unmount that device:
# umount /dev/sdb1
(Notice that there is only one n in umount .)
Now copy the boot image to the USB flash drive:
# dd if=diskboot.img of= /dev/sdb1
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
Flush the system disk buffers to ensure that the data is written out to the drive before you unplug it:
# sync
The USB flash drive is now ready for booting. Insert the drive into the target system, turn it on, and use the BIOS options to specify that the system is to be booted from the USB drive; the rest of the process will be identical to booting from a CD or DVD.
When you're done using the drive to install Fedora Core, you'll find that it looks like an 8 MB drive, regardless of its actual drive capacity. To restore its full capacity, format it with a FAT32 filesystem:
# mkdosfs /dev/sdb1
mkdosfs 2.10 (22 Sep 2003)
10.3.1.2. Preparing a network installation server
You can use any FTP, HTTP, or NIS server for network installation, but of these three, HTTP is the easiest to set up and has the least overhead.
You'll need the full set of installation files. You can copy the entire contents of the DVD (or each of the five CDs) to a directory shared by your web server:
# mkdir /var/www/fedora
# cp -R /media/discname /var/www/fedora
Replace /media/diskname with the disc mount point (see the output of df ).
Instead of copying the files, you could leave the DVD in your drive (this won't work with CDs, since you need several of them) and create a symbolic link from your web server's document root to the DVD mount point:
# ln -s /media/ disk /var/www/html/fedora
Since the DVD's filesystem does not support file attributesnecessary to assign an SELinux contextyou will have to disable SELinux enforcement for HTTPD before using it to serve files from a DVD.
Alternatively, you can download the files directory to your web server directory. Go to the web page http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html , select an rsync , HTTP, or FTP mirror site for download, and download the entire distribution (all of the files and subdirectories in the os directory for your platform).
The directory layout varies from mirror to mirror. Use a browser to connect to your selected mirror site to confirm the directory names for the following commands.
On an existing Fedora Core system, you can do this by first creating a directory that is web-accessible:
# mkdir /var/www/fedora
Then fetch all of the files into that directory:
# cd /var/www/fedora
# wget -nH --cut-dirs= 4 -r http://less.cogeco.net/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/
Note that the URL here is taken from the mirror list, but has the Fedora Core release number ( 6 ) added to the end (replace this URL with that of a mirror close to you). The --cut-dirs= 4 option removes four leading directory names ( pub/fedora/linux/core ) from the retrieved files before saving them.
The downloaded tree will include the ISO files. If you'd rather not download them, use the -X option when you run wget :
# cd /var/www/fedora
# wget -nH -X '/*/*/*/*/*/*/iso' --cut-dirs= 4 -r \ http://less.cogeco.net/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/
(The \ indicates that the command continues on the next line; you can leave it out and type everything on one line.)
The downloaded directory indexes will be saved as files starting with index.html ; these can be deleted using the find command:
# find /var/www/fedora -name 'index.html*' -print -exec rm {} \;
The wget command can also be used with FTP sites:
# cd /var/www/fedora
# wget -X '/*/*/*/*/*/*/iso' -nH -X index.html --cut-dirs= 4 -r \ ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/