However, (Here's the 'But"), I've noticed something that doesn't make a lot of sense, while a quick and nasty fix would have moved Mandrake one more notch up the food-chain.
Network installs are broken, sort of.
Here's a scenario to explain my situation.
During a CD install of LE2005, I see a question about copying the CD's to the hard drive (I assume that I'm not the only one?). Now, for a stand-alone PC, this offers a semi-permanent solution to the complications associated with repeated installs. If you make a 'Replay" or 'Package List' floppy, it's even simpler. Just boot the system, select 'Install from Hard Disk", make sure your custom floppy diskette is in the drive, and you're all set. LE2005 will now install from the install 'Tree' created and stored on the hard drive.
Well, sort of. When this option is chosen, the installer copies the CD's (or the DVD) contents to the folder '/var/ftp/pub/Mandrakelinux/media/'.
Seems fairly innocent enough, right? Nope. This install copies the CD's to the */var* partition, which is one of the basic partitions which
would/should normally be re-formatted during an install, and there is NO option to change to an alternate location. In addition, urpmi and rpmdrake are updated to point to the new location, instead of '/var/cache/urpmi'. If the files get moved to a different location, urpmi becomes convinced that something is either broken or simply incorrect.
This means that each time you want to do a fresh install on the system, you have to copy the CD's onto the hard drive, and into that /var partition. This defeats one of the main features of the this type of install. The ability to re-install from that /var archive and to NOT have to change the CD's during subsequent installs.
So, the only real feature of this option is that you don't have to have your CD's handy to add extra packages to your completed install.
Next point for consideration; As mentioned above 'Copy CD to Hard Drive' places the rpms from the CD's into /var/ftp/pub/Mandrakelinux/media.
This path implies that you can create an install which can later be configured as an FTP location. Sounds great if you want to do multiple installs, but due to a change in the names of the 'hdlist.cz' files that urpmi would normally look for, you can't use this ftp location for installs on other machines, assuming that you're using the Mini CD or the 1st CD to boot from and then trying to point to the ftp repository. It also relies on having all the normal boot and init system files on your CD (Mini or 1st of the 3 CD set).
Also, the 'Copy CD to Hard Drive' option creates 3 folders (main, main2, main3) in the /var/ftp/pub/Mandrakelinux/media/ folder, but installing to a second system fails, because the 1st CD looks for main, contrib and jpackage folders, and also looks for files such as 'hdlist_main.cz, hdlist_contib.cz, etc.
The end result is an FTP site that could essentially be useless for installation to other systems across a network. Unless I've missed something fundamental, this new feature still needs some standardisation and a bit of tweaking.
So, currently, the solution is to download the DVD ISO image, mount it and extract it to a folder, config an anonymous FTP server to point at that location and to use the 'boot.iso' image located in the '/install/images' folder of the now-extracted DVD iso (which would be the root of your anonymous FTP folder.
The boot.iso file can be burned to any size of CD-blank (it's only 14 MB's) and boot from it, selecting the ftp install and pointing it to your anonymous FTP server's base directory.
After your first install, make a copy of your packages list and put that on a floppy diskette. Use the 'Select Individual Packages' option at the bottom of the package list panel (during the install) and click on the floppy icon at the bottom of that next panel.
Total install time should be about 17 minutes assuming that your FTP server is just another PC or server on your network and you have a working DHCP service working on your network.
If anyone has had different results, I'd really like to hear from you. Repeated installs can be a major pain when upgrading an entire network and you don't have a lot of time to get the work done.
I'm hoping that someone can help me modify that 14MB boot.iso image so that the package list and a specific pointer to the ftp server can be added to the list of locations, which shows up when booting that 14 MB boot.iso image.
From what I can tell, it seems that the Mandrake Mini CD as well as the 1st CD of the 3 CD download set, will also work the same way, but not if you point it to the 3 CD's whcih were copied to the hard drive. Obviously, the same can be done with floppy disks, but it's a bit more complicated to prepare those floppies, while the boot.iso seems to have all the network drivers that the average user will need.
Still, it's a bit frustrating to see that Mandriva missed this one when creating LE2005. They were sooooooo close!
One more thing,...If you want KDE 3.4 installed, don't select any KDE packages during your install. Select the cooker locations from Easyurpmi and then install the KDE 3.4 packages using RPMDrake or Urpmi. Works like a charm!
Hope this info helps someone.
Helpful suggestions would be very much appreciated.
-- Mr. Geek Registered Linux User #190712
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