After having no luck solving a whacky gtk+ dependency issue in Ubuntu 6.06 (another blog post will follow with those gory details), i set out to install another distro on my spare laptop.ÂÂ
Fedora was my “old” favorite distro, so that was my first choice. It’s also widely supported, RPMs for most software can be found for a variety of fedora versions.ÂÂ
One thing i really like about Ubuntu, is the single CD installer. Here i am, faced with installing a new distro, one for which i have no media. No problem — It’s open source and i know where to find it. I browse to my favorite mirror and find that Fedora has grown to a hefty 5 CDs. Wtf? 5 Cds!? I won’t be installing until tomorrow — And that’s if no one else at the office wants access to the T1 today (unlikely).ÂÂ
Then i got a brilliant idea (yes, that’s rare)! In the past, at various Linux install fests and once at SANS, i had installed from an http server as a source. Why can’t i do the same for this install? That was my mission, to find a way to avoid downloading 5 CDs of which i will probably use only 10-15% of the content (i needed a pretty bare install).ÂÂ
Previous versions of RedHat had a “netboot” (or maybe it was “boot” plus “network” — I forget). I set out looking for that. Browsing through the directory structure of the files, i found “boot.iso” in /os/images/ and started there. I downloaded and burned to a CDRW (RW just incase i had to start over, plus i had one kicking around…), popped it into my laptop and booted into the installer. After answering the locale info, i’m asked what my source will be: CD-Rom, Hard Drive, NFS, ftp, http. Voila! http and ftp! Joy! I choose http, then anaconda (the installer) asked for the server name and source path. ÂÂ
I used: fedora.lsu.edu (no “http://”) for the server and “dist/linux/core/6/i386/os/” (note there’s no leading slash but there is a trailing slash, and don’t type the quotes–duh) for the source path.ÂÂ
If you’re not sure, the installer lets you keep trying until it is happy with your selection and installation can proceed. I browsed the LSU mirror a bit before making my first guess to get an idea of their directory structure.ÂÂ
If you use that URL in a browser, you’ll be browing the OS RPMs: http://fedora.lsu.edu/dist/linux/core/6/i386/os/ at Louisiana State University (gotta love the .edu bandwidth 
). You can of course, substitute your favorite mirror, the key is that they have the RPMs available for download and not just the ISOs. My install is still running, and it’ll be done way before a 5 CD download would have been done. “Remaining time” shows 145 minutes, not the hours and hour the 3.3GB would have taken – Rock on!ÂÂ
ÂÂ