Date: April 7, 2011

I have an older Pentium III (i386) system with only a CDROM drive, no DVD, that I need to do an install on. (Not that it is all that relevant, but this system has a 600 Mhz Pentium-III, with 786M of RAM, a matrox video card, a 3Com 10/100 PCI network card, all on a gigabyte BX2000 motherboard (which has 2 ISA slots, which is why I am even bothering with this ancient thing).

Without a DVD drive, doing a fresh install is problematic. I can either try to dig up a DVD drive, or burn a network install CD and do things that way, which might make for some fun and variety.

I am finally winding up this whole business almost a month later. What I learned in a nutshell is:

booting the network CD

I fetch the ISO image fedora/releases/14/Fedora/i386/iso/Fedora-14-i386-netinst.iso and burn it onto a CD.

The first problem I encounter is not linux related. I am trying to use a 120G ATA drive, and this old Gigabyte BX2000 V.F2 motherboard does not like it. It is happier with a 40G ATA drive, which is too bad. It looks like this is an ancient BIOS (F9 is available from the Gigabyte site, even in 2011!!!) A 40G drive will have to do.

The second problem I encounter is that the network install will not allow me to static configure IPv4 information, so I am forced to set up a DHCP entry for the machine.
I filed this as fedora bugzilla bug 694653.

After setting up the DHCP entry and going through the dialogs to do disk partitioning, this thing just takes off and begins the install, I never got a chance to tell it to use our local fedora repository (which sucks as far as I am concerned), but it is off to the races using heaven knows what "official" fedora repository, but I had intended to avoid burdening the online sites with my install. I also figure that things would go a lot faster with traffic only on our fast LAN, oh well.

The old way

Some old notes I have (from Fedora 11 days) indicate that you have to launch into an alternate dialog to do what I want, you watch for the grub menu (the first menu after the CD actually boots), interrupt it (I hit tab, but any key might work), then edit the boot line to add the "askmethod" kernel option. I just append it to the boot line which hitting the tab key displays. It turns out this is a perfect workaround for the bug I filed.

I verified that this still works with both the fedora 14 network install CD, as well as the fedora 15 alpha network install CD.

This will run a quaint and antique looking non-graphical install dialog, after selecting your language and keyboard, you are offered a menu of methods. You select the bottom option (labelled URL) and give it a path like: 

http://server.mydomain/fedora/releases/14/Fedora/i386/os
You can check that you have the path right by ensuring that the directory given by the path above contains a directory "images" which in turn contains the file "install.img" (along with other things).

You are also allowed to set up the ipv4 info here as well, so this would have been a workaround to my issue, as well as letting me specify the repository to work from.

Fedora 15 alpha install

After reporting the network install bug, the developers asked me to try the Fedora 15 alpha to see if the bug was fixed. Indeed it was, and the new network install lets me enter IP information up front, as well as having a working "configure network" button later in the process.

The default network install uses one of the fedora mirror sites (no telling which one), and once it is done, lo and behold my system will not boot, and it would seem that grub never got installed.

It turns out that the live DVD image is actually small enough to burn onto a CD (just because it says DVD, doesn't mean it has to be done that way!!). This is good news because the system I am working on does not have a DVD drive, and I need something like a live CD to diagnose the boot problem.

My attempt to run grub-install and to run grub by hand all fail. I decide that enough is enough and drop back to using the askmethod workaround to use do a Fedora 14 install.

Back to doing a Fedora 14 network install "the old way"

I boot the fedora 14 i386 network install CD that I originally had problems with, but this time as soon as it presents the initial menu (which is being presented by grub by the way), I hit tab, and append "askmethod" to the boot line, which gives me the following: 
vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img stage2=hd:LABEL="Fedora" askmethod
Note that I did not type all that in, I just appended "askmethod", then I hit return and away it goes booting up the kernel from the install CD. It fires up the ancient non-graphical dialog (which is encouraging), then lets me enter my IPv4 number, netmask, gateway, and the IP number of my DNS server. It accepts all of this, then asks me for a URL, and I give it: 
http://ourserver/fedora/releases/14/Fedora/i386/os
It seems to like this just fine and it looks like we are off to the races, but ....

The installer decides it has missing dependencies (which is weird). Eventually it blows up with a python exception: 

rpmdb: __db_meta_setup: /mnt/sysimage/var/lib/rpm/Providename: unexpected file type or format
What is actually going on here is that it thinks it is doing an upgrade, but from my broken Fedora 15 install to Fedora 14.

What I need to do is to ensure that the partitions I set up get reformatted, nuking my old install from orbit. The trick is that when I select "custom layout", I must be sure to click on the boxes that tell it to format the filesystems!. That forces it to do a fresh install instead of trying to do an upgrade. Too bad that it defaults to trying to do an upgrade.

Post install configuration

For some unknown reason, this BX2000 system will not boot from the hard drive with the BIOS "Auto" setting. When I explicitly set LBA, it boots fine (I actually use the BIOS drive detect utility and select LBA from the menu it offers. It turns out I could have used a 60G drive on this board.

After booting, I immediately edit grub.conf and get rid of the rhgb feature.

And my network config has vanished, good old network manager screwing up as always, ifconfig -a shows that eth0 is not configured.
so we do: 

yum erase NetworkManager
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
service network restart
chkconfig network on
And that is fixed. I hate network manager.

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d so that fedora.repo and fedora-updates.repo point to our local mirror and do: 

yum -y update
There are 515 packages to update (it is near the end of Fedora 14, and Fedora 15 is almost ready to be released). Away it goes!
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org