Comments from Taiga #61

Ryan W Walter 02 Dec 2019 11:29
I am placing this back Into the spec category. Right now I have not been able to place aside the time to research into this.

Gregory Lee Bartholomew 12 Nov 2019 11:28
I think the kexec option probably has the most flexibility in that regard. You should be able to do something like (untested):

$ MIRROR=https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/30/Workstation/x86_64/os
$ wget $MIRROR/isolinux/vmlinuz
$ wget $MIRROR/isolinux/initrd.img
$ sudo kexec -f vmlinuz --initrd=initrd.img --append="ip=dhcp inst.repo=$MIRROR"

The above should work from any version of Linux that has an available internet connection and the kexec command. If you don't have a console available (e.g. you are running it on a cloud-based VM), you might also need to provide the Anaconda options to set up a VNC connection. The Anaconda options (which are passed on the kernel command line as shown above) are documented here:

https://anaconda-installer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/boot-options.html

Good Luck! 😄

Ryan W Walter 12 Nov 2019 10:14
What I originally had in mind was to run dnf from an existing Fedora installation (i.e. the original title was "3 Ways to Install Fedora from Fedora"). That said, I seem to recall someone asking if the guide could be generalized to installing Fedora from ANY version of Linux (which makes a lot of since if you want to pick up potential new Fedora users). I believe you could run dnf --installroot from within Anaconda if you first created a minimal /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo file. I think I did that once, but its been a while.

You are correct. I was just investigating if it would be possible, It would be odd to say "To install Fedora first you need Fedora!" So I was looking at an Arch-esk approach.

To install fedora from anything you would need a container probably. Not entirely sure how one could do that from docker directly to a disk.

Gregory Lee Bartholomew 12 Nov 2019 09:53
What I originally had in mind was to run dnf from an existing Fedora installation (i.e. the original title was "3 Ways to Install Fedora from Fedora"). That said, I seem to recall someone asking if the guide could be generalized to installing Fedora from ANY version of Linux (which makes a lot of since if you want to pick up potential new Fedora users). I believe you could run dnf --installroot from within Anaconda if you first created a minimal /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo file. I think I did that once, but its been a while.

Ryan W Walter 12 Nov 2019 09:19
Spoke with Gregory B. over the mailing list last week about any potential resources.

https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-build-a-netboot-server-part-1/ and https://fedoramagazine.org/netboot-a-fedora-live-cd/ are two Fedmag posts that glance over this topic.

During testing with DNF --install-root I was having difficulty using the Fedora installer CD directly, Anaconda seems to have reference to external repositories but the default dnf locations do not seem to have them.

Ryan W Walter 08 Nov 2019 10:27
To elaborate, "Install using QEMU" could either mean using virt-install or just a raw QEMU command to load a disk. I would like to demonstrate both,

DNF --installroot and kexec would work hand in hand. Kexec allows us to boot a new kernel without Bios, We would still need to load the new kernel with a package manager.

Ryan W Walter 08 Nov 2019 10:21
I'm currently looking at this and it seems like it may be a bit much for just one post, Perhaps a 3 part series would be better for this.

Currently researching the methods described, since I wasn't aware of them either.

this is a test of the zinebot 'ping' command