[RULE] Interesting laptop install; upgrading to Gnome etc

[Jerry Vonau]

I'm a first time poster..

> On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 16:13:35 PM +0000, Philip Rhoades
>  phil at pricom.com.au  wrote:
> > People,
> >
> > I finally got around to testing slinky v0.5 with FC3 on a PIII 450MHz
> > laptop.  As an exercise I thought I would do an NFS install from a RH9
> > machine's CD drive not realising I wouldn't get prompted to change CDs
> > like that.
>
> Well, with any remote install (NFS, FTP...) every package must be in
> the same place from the beginning. So you should copy the content of
> all cdroms on the hard disk _then_ start. This is a really rough and
> incomplete description!!! To do it well, check the FC3/RHEL docs on
> this issue, and follow their instructions.
>
> > Anyway the minimal install still seemed to work even though it
> > missed a few (X?) things from CD2 but I couldn't get the laptop to
> > boot.
>
> This probably doesn't depend (only??) from slinky. It used to be that
> the first CD of several distros was enough to do their minimal
> install, but if this is still true with FC3 I don't know. So, the
> first thing to check here is if FC3 minimal can be installed by
> Anaconda using only the first CD. In any case, which error messages
> did you get at boot?

I've been using loadlin to boot the fedora installer from an dos drive, and
doing a http install, as the kernel is too big for a floppy, that has worked
well
for me in the past. Fedora's base install will only use rpms from CD1 of the
set.
I could do that by mounting the iso, symlinking it to where I needed it, and
using
http or nfs to do the install. Then use yum to install the rest, and get the
latest releases
in the process. I've been playing around with the slinky installer, I had to
copy CD1's
rpms to a directory, and add lilo's rpm from CD3 to the mix to get slinky to
complete.
Thanks for the included network modules, matched what I was using. Would you
mind
sharing your .config file? Fedora doesn't list one for 386/486, just 586, I'd
like to play
around with 386 kernels too, just look for a shortcut.

> > So I just went to a straight FC3 install from the laptop's CD drive but
> > it failed on CD3 (I think) with an anaconda error message.
>
> which one?
>
> > So then I tried a slinky install using the local CD and that worked
> > fine. I then tried to upgrade to a full Gnome environment by
> > manually installing the extra rpms.  I think I have installed
> > everything that would be necessary but I can't get the desktop to
> > come up
>
> again (sorry to be verbose...): any error messages anywhere? I also
> think that maybne you have to add something to the .xinitrc file, but
> I don't know Gnome in that detail, sorry. The place to look for this
> particular answer is the Gnome "install from source"
> documentation. From there we can start to look what is missing in your
> system.
>
> >
> > Is there a convenient way to add more packages to a basic slinky
> > install?
>
> The way is the same as with normal Fedora, that's the whole point of
> RULE: rpm, apt, synaptic.... So, basically, from a minimal install you
> should install by hand apt, yum and/or synaptic, solving the
> dependencies by trial and error. When them are up, they will pull in
> everything else.
>
What I'm looking to do, is have an installer that lays down a base system,
installs yum, them use yum to groupinstall/update the rest of the packages.
>From the looks of skinky, I could use the rulerc.sh file to install the packages
required for yum, which is part of  Fedora's base install, so CD1 is all that is
required. I just need to get the dependences right, and have a 386/486 kernel
available in my yum repository, for this to work in all the lowend boxes that I
have around.

Jerry Vonau