Hi Ray, Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > can debian be installed on a headless pc? and if so, anyone know > where a nice howto is?
Here is how I did it, (I just tried it as it seemed interesting). I did it with floppies but a CD install would follow the same idea. I grabbed the rescue.bin image from my debian-30r1-i386-binary-1 CD and copied it to a free spot on my system. I mounted it like so: $ mount -o loop -t vfat rescue.bin /mnt Now you have a copy of the filesystem of the install boot disk mounted on /mnt Then I edited /mnt/syslinux.cfg, I changed two params, (have a look at /usr/share/doc/syslinux/syslinux.doc.gz for the whole story): APPEND console=ttyS0 vga=normal noinitrd load_ramdisk=1 \ prompt_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=16384 root=/dev/fd0 disksize=1.44 TIMEOUT 10 I added "console=ttyS0" to the APPEND directive so syslinux would boot the kernel image with this additional option. This tells the kernel to use the first serial port as the console. I also changed the TIMEOUT from '0' to '10' lest the boot loader just wait endless for input. Then I unmounted the image and wrote it out to a floppy dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/fd0 I connected to the serial port with minicom and continued with the install, you will have to feed in the additional floppies, etc. I should say that I did NOT finish the install as my interest was only in this initial setup. I have done numerous headless installs before without trouble but IIRC they were primarily with console access servers but I think a few were with minicom. BTW, you will need a monitor to config your BIOS for a serial port and the correct boot order. hth, jereme -- +--------------------------------------------------------------+ Jereme Corrado <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> System Administrator Restorative Management Corp. gpg: 1024D/9C39E1F0 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
