You have two ways you can ``FTP'' install your system. If you have an Ethernet card and are connected to the Internet, you can download just the three boot images and start installing via the network. If you are not directly on the Internet, but you do have access to an account from which you can FTP the distribution, you can download everything to a DOS or ext2 partition and install from there.
FTP to one of the above sites. You will see several directories, but
the only ones you are concerned with are RedHat
and images
. You
may also need to get some of the files in the dos
directory if
you are doing this from DOS.
First you will need to get a boot image. To do that, cd
into
the distribution directory and then into the images/1213
directory.
Now get the image.idx
file. Exit ftp (or just escape back) and look
at the image.idx
file. You'll see something like the following:
0000; None; None; IDE/ATAPI or SCSI
0001; None; None; Mitsumi (not IDE/ATAPI), Sony CDU31A/CDU33A/CDU535
.
.
The file is separated by semi-colons into columns. The first column is
a boot image number. The second column tells you what kind of SCSI
support the kernel contains. The third column tells you what kind of
Ethernet support the kernel contains. The fourth column tells you what
kind of CD-ROMs the kernel supports.
Find the line that most closely matches your hardware and record the
number. Then return to your FTP session where you found the
image.idx
file and download the corresponding boot image (bootXXXX.img
where
XXXX
is the number you recorded).
Next go to the images
directory and download both ramdisk1.img
and ramdisk2.img
.
You should now have the following:
bootXXXX.img ramdisk1.img ramdisk2.img
To make the images under Linux, you should use dd
as follows:
dd of=/dev/fd0 if=ramdisk1.img
[swap floppy disks and label]
dd of=/dev/fd0 if=ramdisk2.img
[swap floppy disks and label]
dd of=/dev/fd0 if=bootXXXX.img
Existing Linux users may also want to download and run the
savesetup.pl
Perl script after writing the boot floppy.
It saves a number of TCP/IP parameters and XFree86 configuration
to the boot floppy for use during the installation. To use it,
mount your boot floppy disk somewhere, and run:
savesetup.pl [mountpoint]
Under DOS, you need to run rawrite.exe
to make the disks. You can FTP this
utility from the dos
directory of the FTP site. Put it somewhere
in your path. You can then run rawrite
and tell it what file
to write and which drive to write to. Do this for all three floppies
labelling them as you go.
If you have an Ethernet card and are on the network, you can now do the install via the network. The only things you need are the three floppy disks you just created in the previous step. Note that this method of install will NOT work via PPP or SLIP -- you must have a direct ethernet connection to the Internet. If you want to install via PPP or SLIP, you will have to first do a minimal install as described in the next section ``Installing from a spare partition''. Once up, you can use PPP or SLIP from linux to download anything else you might want.
Since you should have your boot disk and ramdisks, you are ready
to do your Internet FTP install. Just boot the boot disk and insert
the ramdisks as prompted.
Hopefully your Ethernet card was detected at boot time.
If not, you may have picked the wrong boot image for your hardware or
you may need to specify hardware parameters at the LILO
prompt.
Once your machine has booted and your hardware has been detected, continue by
answering the normal questions and then by saying you want to do an
FTP install. At that point, pick a site close to you (or choose ``custom''
and enter a FTP site and directory from the MIRRORS
file) and you should
be off! Your install should run from there just like any other install.
If your only access to the Internet for your target machine is via PPP or SLIP or even Zmodem or Kermit, you can download Red Hat 2.0 to a DOS or ext2 partition and install it from there. It isn't the fastest way, but it can be done.
The basic steps are as follows:
base
directoryCreate the boot and ramdisk floppies as described in the ``Getting the Boot Images'' section.
At the ``root'' of your DOS or ext2 drive or partition,
make a directory called RedHat
. Then cd
in there and make an RPMS
directory and a base
directory.
Note that for a DOS drive, the capitalization of the RedHat
is
insignificant.
From the FTP site, download the RedHat/base/series
file and place
it in your local RedHat/base
directory. It
will look something like:
0
1 Base
MAKEDEV
SysVinit
adduser
at
bash
bdflush
cpio
crontabs
dev
e2fsprogs
ed
etcskel
file
fileutils
findutils
gawk
getty_ps
gpm
.
.
end
This shows you most of the ``base'' series.
The series
file describes all the series, and which packages
they contain.
The first line in each series contains a number and the name of the series;
you can ignore the number.
The series ends with the keyword ``end''. Everything inbetween
is an RPM name.
For each series that you want you need to download all of the corresponding RPMs. It may not hurt to leave some RPMs out, but we highly recommend that you get all the RPMs for each series you select. At a minimum, you should get all the packages in the ``base'' series.
There is a directory RedHat/sets
which contains subdirectories
for each series in the series file. In each subdirectory there are
symbolic links to the actual packages in RedHat/RPMS
. This
can be used for two benefits. One, you can download an entire series
by going to the proper directory and getting everything in it, and
two, if you are installing from DOS the filenames will fit the DOS
8.3 convention. The installation scripts do not care what the rpm
package filenames are -- so you don't have to worry about them being
called package.031
and so on.
With this, you can easily download everything you need to make a complete series. Just download everything in each subdir that you want into your RPMS directory on your local hard drive. Note: When you are done, all your RPM files should be in the RPMS directory.
In addition, if you will be installing the X Window System, you will need to get an XFree86 server package corresponding to your video hardware. These packages are:
XFree86-8514 XFree86-P9000
XFree86-AGX XFree86-S3
XFree86-Mach32 XFree86-SVGA
XFree86-Mach64 XFree86-VGA16
XFree86-Mach8 XFree86-W32
XFree86-Mono
cd
to the RPMS
dir on your local drive and download the RPMs
that you need into it. If you are using a DOS drive, don't worry about the file names. Just download
them and let whatever happens to the names happen. The installation
actually examines the internals of
each file directly to determine the full name and version of the package.
Now cd
into the base
directory that you created earlier and
download fsstnd.cgz
and skeleton.cgz
to
that directory.
You should now be ready to install! You may now skip ahead to the ``Continuing the Install'' section.
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