cogs
installing ancient linux, via netboot.
Old Linux has been a hobby of mine for a while, but I've discovered that it doesn't like my disc drive at all. It's an old, pretty generic LG drive that came built into the machine, circa 2008, but Linux from 2004 obviously does not like it. HOWEVER, a technology called Netboot has existed since, like, 1984. It's a wonderful piece of tech which allows you to boot a machine over ethernet instead of with a disc, pendrive, or hard drive. Unfortunately, it's an absolute pain in the ass to set up and get working. It took me 3 tries and 2 modern Linux installs to pull off, neither of which were necessary. I began trying to install Debian on a virtual machine. Unfortunately, Debian shit itself mid-install, at the end where it was attempting to install GRUB, so I migrated to Ubuntu Server. I hit more trouble with networking on Ubuntu as, for some reason, DHCP wouldn't work and I couldn't even ping my router. I gave one last shot to installing on Windows, which didn't go well as it turns out DNS and DHCP are an important part of PXE netboot. Finally, I gave a shot to my Raspberry Pi, which turned out to be the winner. I installed DNSmasq, NFS-Kernel-Server, and tftpd-hpa onto the Pi, but it turns out that DNSmasq has a built-in TFTP server which I ended up using instead. I set it to boot PXELINUX (part of the standard syslinux distribution) and copied the vmlinuz and initrd.img from Fedora to the root of the TFTP server. I then gutted the install ISO to the NFS root folder, fired up the client, and referenced the Fedora ISOLINUX configuration to see what boot options I should use. Finally - FINALLY - I saw the fabled linux boot log. I then saw it choke on the initrd, because that was broken, but after fixing it (it copied improperly) I booted the system, and saw X. I reformatted my hard disk via TTY and install went through all 1339 or so packages without a hitch! Finally, after so long - an entire day's work - I saw Fedora's welcome screen, which created an account for me. After a few minutes, I was into GNOME 2! That paid off nicely.