[wellylug] Installing without a CD drive

[Robin Hinde]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2003 11:55, Rob Giltrap wrote:
> Mission complete
>
> Thanks for the pointers, it was surprisingly easy to do! Simply RTFM
>
> Rob.

I've just done the same here, on two different systems, with mixed results. 
Upgrade of desktop from 9.1 was perfect, reinstall of laptop running 9.1 has 
broken networking (even though the network worked fine for the installation).

Network installs are definitely the way to go, though. Fast and easy - I 
haven't done one since the days of OS/2, I'd forgotten how easy they are. 

A couple of things aren't clear from what I've read about doing installs this 
way, dunno if this will help or not :-)

If installing Mandrake, copy the contents of all 3 discs to the same directory 
- this means you will have subdirs named RPMS, RPMS2 and RPMS3 below the 
Mandrake directory. You still point your installation to the directory that 
Mandrake is in.

After installation is complete, you may not be able to access the software 
source you installed from. You may need to manually mount (or otherwise 
configure) your installation media directory (I used an NFS export from my 
fileserver) before installing additional packages. Alternatively you can go 
back to CD based updates if you reconfigure software sources.

cheers