PXE or RPL install for Fedora 9

Can anyone tell me how to do this? My laptop doesnt have an internal optical drive and my bios doesnt support booting from usb. It does support 2 network boot options: PXE and RPL. Can someone tell me how to do this or point me in the right direction? Thanks

 

You basically have to setup a Linux PXE boot, "install server" to which you would point your PXE boot machine at. This install server has a number of network tools on it, dhcp server, tftp server, and most importantly PXE Linux boot images for your machine. Your machine connects to the server through it's PXE boot process, gets its network information/address, and then dowloads the PXE boot Linux mini-image, which then allows it to boot up enough to enable a network installation of your Linux distro. Here's a Fedora howto describing the process in detail, and here's another one. Here's a similar howto using Ubuntu as the PXE install server.

Good Luck..

 

Those both use fedora core 4. will there be any difference in doing it with fedora 9?

btw, thanks for your help it's very much appreciated

 

What about launching the install CD by command from an external writer? No BIOS updates? just throwing it out there.

 

I probably didn't explain it properly. In order to do a PXE boot and install, it involves significant external resources, so it wouldn't likely be the first choice for us typical "SOHO users". First off you need to setup a server, (almost any OS would work), which will contain the startup and installation services for your PXE boot client machine. These services include a DHCP server, so that the PXE boot machine can get a proper network address, a TFTP server, which will allow the PXE boot machine to download the initial PXE boot Linux mini-image, and then an NFS server, which will provide an NFS share of the full Linux OS installation software to the PXE boot client machine, after its rebooted with the Linux mini-image.

The PXE boot machine can then PXE boot from the NIC, be provided with a network address from the DHCP server, and then download the PXE boot mini-image from your TFTP server, and then your PXE client machine will need to be rebooted. Once it is rebooted, it will access the NFS share for the Linux OS install on your server, and go on to finish the network install of the entire OS from there. In terms of making sure you have the right Linux, in your case Fedora 9, you just need to make sure you have a Fedora 9 PXE boot mini-image, sometimes referred to as a tftp boot image, or netboot image, that gets served to your PXE boot machine, and then have the necessary install files for your OS served from you server via NFS. It's a complicated process, so PXE boot installs are usually done in bigger IT departments of businesses or universities, etc.

What would be cool is if anyone could build an internet based PXE boot farm of servers that would allow anyone on the internet the ability to PXE boot into the server farm, and then download the Linux distro netboot image of choice, and then proceed to install everything over the internet. Then you could distro hop all without any CDs.. I just haven't heard of anything like that.

Good Luck..

 

ok. looks like i wont be doing a PXE install after all... any other ideas on how to install fedora?

My laptop doesnt support botting usb devices of any kind. I've tried usb keys and external cd/dvd media. The BIOS has been updated and it has the option to boot from cd-rom but for some reason wont boot from the drive. Would the fact that the external drive is a dvd/cd-rom drive be the cause of the problem? For reference I have a Toshiba R100

 

Aaahhh... I see. You do indeed have a problem, the good thing is that lots of users out there that have an R100, have installed Linux on them using various methods. You might want to spend some time reading their experiences to figure out what would work best for you;

1) Debian on the TOSHIBA Portege R100
2) Linux Fedora Core 4 Installation notes on Toshiba Portege R100
3) Running RedHat 9 Linux on a Toshiba Satellite Protege R100

and my favorite is this one;

4) The Easy Way To A Debian Install

Pretty slick way to get around the problem.

Good Luck..

 

After just a quick look-see from the live CD this morning it doesn't look all that different from Ubuntu. I have an old athlon 2600+ desktop running Debian that I think am going to try Fedora with.