Performing a network install of the Fedora 10 beta didn’t work for me because of the bug in the Intel e1000e driver. Using my local rawhide repo I built the ISOs to do a hard drive install from a separate partition which failed too. At that point I gave up on the x86_64 and went with a network install of i386 and box too old to need the e1000e driver.
The only smooth part of the process was creating the DVD ISO using a local copy of the rawhide (development) trees for a majority of the bits.
Here is how I did it for the x86_64 DVD ISO:
1) Go to http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
2) Click on jigdo link for desired arch and save two files to your system
Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.jigdo
Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.template
Downloading the template file too saves a little time because the first step jigdo does is search for it on a mirror. Make sure you are working in a filesystem with plenty of space and make your local package repo or install tree accessible as a filesystem:
- local hardrive directory
- nfs share
Based on my experience jigdo cannot access files on a local network with http, though I suppose you might be able to configure jigdo somehow to consider it a mirror.
4) Start the process:
$ jigdo-lite Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.jigdo
5) Answer the prompt by pointing it to the location of your local repo
Jigdo will scan your local repo and pick up as many local packages as it can and then return you to a prompt for another location to search. After you have exhausted your local options hit return and it will go out to the mirrors and look for the remaining packages.
The way to do the least amount of downloading for missing packages is to make sure you have a good sync of rawhide a day or two before release day. Or in my case remove the --delete
flag from rsync so as to preserve previously downloaded files.
All told the process took approximately 50 minutes to scan my local repo, download 20 missing files, and build the DVD ISO image and used very little bandwidth.
October 14, 2008 at 5:19 pm
@allenhalsey
Thanks for your comment and good information.
No, I didn’t try using the netinst.iso. I tried a way I’ve used forever which is to temporarily mount the install DVD and copy initrd.img and vmlinuz to /boot and create a special grub entry to boot them. It is all scripted so it is quick and doesn’t require burning media or setting up a USB stick.
Looking at some of the links you suggested maybe it wasn’t a bug that I couldn’t install from hardisk as I’ve been accustomed to. I’ll have to give it another try.
October 14, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Since you already had a local rawhide repo, did you try booting off the netinst.iso cd and using the ‘repo=hd:/’ or ‘askmethod’ anaconda options described here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=465184
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/Installer#Changes_in_Anaconda
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Options
When I did my install, I didn’t know about those options and I successfully performed a hard drive install using the following steps:
1. boot off off of the netinst.iso cd
2. switch to a virtual terminal
3. mount partition that contained my F10beta dvd iso
4. mount the iso at /mnt/F10dvd
5. Edit /etc/anaconda_repos.d/rawhide.repo
6. Comment out the mirror_list line
7. Add base_url=file:///mnt/f10dvd
In your case, you may have been able to point the base_url parameter to your local rawhide repo.