Afternoon,
% > I have a tricky machine -- no CD, no video, no keyboard, no floppy -- on % > which I'd nonetheless like to install SuSE 8.1. The machine is currently % > running a Linux From Scratch build, and I have an alternate root slice % > ready to go with plenty of space in /home for a copy of the DVD. % % How about you make a bootp combined install server and PXE boot over the % network instead? That ought to be one of the better ways to install that % box.
Hmmm... That's not a bad idea. I'll have to check to see if the quad card that it has can do a network boot, but that might get me there.
When you boot the machine, does it say anything about Intel PXE something or another on the screen? If it does, you should be able to network boot. Most network cards today can do this.
Has SuSE yet gotten their equivalent of kickstart going?
I think that with SLPro 8.2 there is a way of installing over the network. I have not investigated this, but I seem to recall it exists.
% > Any idea how I can proceed? Can I perhaps do a little chroot magic and % > start the install? % % Possibly. You would have to investigate what the bootimage and initrd on % the DVD actually does, and then mimic that.
OK. And initrd is just the initial ram disk, which should be an ext2 image, right?
The initrd is usually a gzipped image of a ext2 or minix filesystem.
Normal today is ext2. Gunzip the image, loopmount it somewhere and have
a poke around what it does. Look for the linuxrc file as that should be
the first thing that gets run.
Rgds,
--
Anders Karlsson