Creating an Install Set
In order to install Fedora 8.0 on your system, you will need a
set of CD's that contain the installation. First you need access to the
iso files. These are files that are ISO9660 compliant, which means that
they are in the format required for a CD. These files are available
esus at /home/ftp/rh80iso. There are 5 files of importance there with names
of the form: psyche-i386-discN.iso, where N is 1 - 5. You
will only need the first three to do the installation.
To make the CD's, first mount the directory where the iso files live:
mkdir redhat # create a directory to mount to
mount -t nfs esus.cs.montana.edu:/home/ftp/rh80
redhat
ls redhat should now show you the list of files. Then you create
the CD's by:
cd redhat
put a cd in the cd writer
cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -v speed=4
-data psyche-i386-disc1.iso
Be patient, this will take a bit of time
Repeat this for the discs 1, 2 and 3 and you have your set. Be sure
you mark the CD's so that you know which is which.
Creating a Boot Floppy
In most cases, you could now install by setting the BIOS on your machine
to boot from the CD and booting. However, the systems you are using don't
allow booting from the CD, so you will need a floppy disk to get the whole
thing started. The easiest place to get the boot disk image is from the
CD's you just created. Put disk1 in the CD/DVD reader on your system. It
may automount; you can check this by typing mount and looking for
something of the form:
/dev/cdrom on /mnt/cdrom type iso9660 (ro,nosuid,nodev,user=...)
in the list. Note that the location could be /mnt/cdrom1 or something slightly
different. If you don't see anything like this, type
mount -tiso9660 /dev/cdrom on /mnt/cdrom
and that should mount the device. If you look in /mnt/cdrom/images you will
see a file named boot.img. You need to copy this image file onto a floppy
disk. This can be accomplished with the command:
dd if=/mnt/cdrom/boot.img of=/dev/fd0
When this finishes, you are ready to go. Put the first CD in the CD-ROM
drive and the floppy disk in the floppy drive and power-on or reset your
system. If it won't read the floppy disk, you will have to enter the
BIOS setup utility and modify the setting specific to the boot devices
under the Advanced settings. Make sure that the floppy disk is
specified as one of the boot devices, probably the first one.
Creating a Boot Floppy with Windows
If you are culturally deprived, you may want to create your boot floppy
with a Windows system. In order to do this, you need a program named
rawrite that will write a Linux floppy on a Windows system. Fortunately,
this is also on your CDROM under the dosutils directory, which is at the
same level in the directory tree as images. Since a Windows system
will also read ISO9660 CD's, all you have to do is copy rawrite.exe to
your system and execure it, giving it the path to the boot image and the
floppy drive ID (probably a:) and it will create your bootable floppy.