Installing from Network Volumes or Hard Drives

Although this book has been largely concerned with the use of Fedora Core 4 on a single desktop computer, installed from the included CD-ROM media, it's also possible to manage Fedora Core 4 installations for larger numbers of computers. For example, if you plan to install Fedora Core 4 on a large number of networked computer systems, having to insert and remove CDs throughout the install for each computer in question can be time-consuming.

For these and other kinds of situations, Fedora Core 4 provides for several alternate install methods, aside from the basic CD-ROM install. To enable installation from sources other than CD-ROM, enter the words linux askmethod at the prompt when first booting your install media.

The installer boots into text mode, and you are asked to select a language and keyboard layout (see the details earlier in this appendix for text mode navigation hints). After selecting a language and keyboard layout, you see a dialog box asking you to select an installation source, as shown in Figure A.8.

Figure A.7. After booting with linux askmethod, you are asked to select an installation source.

Each option is slightly different in the way it works, but all of them eventually lead to the text mode installer described earlier:

• Select Local CD-ROM to continue to install from the currently inserted CD-ROM, rather than one of the alternate sources.

• Select Hard Drive if you have previously copied the entire contents of the Fedora Core 4 CD-ROMs into a single directory tree on your hard drive and want to use those files as your source media.

• Select NFS Image if the contents of the Fedora Core 4 CD-ROMs can be accessed on some other computer via Network File Service (NFS); you are then asked to provide network details about the remote machine so that the NFS volume can be mounted.

• Select FTP if you want to install from contents of the Fedora Core 4 CD-ROMs that are stored on a remote machine and available via File Transfer Protocol (FTP); you are then asked for the remote machine's address, the path to the archive, and login information.

• Select HTTP if you want to install from contents of the Fedora Core 4 CD-ROMs that are stored on a remote machine and available via its web server; you are then asked for a remote URL and login information.

Complete details about these alternate installation methods are beyond the scope of a book like this one. For most readers, the correct installation method remains the CD-ROMs that are included with this book, as outlined in Chapter 2.