7. Installation of Distributions

7.1.1. Installation from the Red Hat 6.0, 6.1 or 6.2 CD

Red Hat have made their distribution CD bootable from SRM console [1] To start an installation, put the CD in and type the following:

>>> boot srm-device -file kernels/generic.gz -flags root=linux-device

In the above, the SRM device name and Linux device name for your CD-ROM drive are needed. For Example if the machine had an IDE cdrom installed as primary master the command would look like this:

>>> boot dqa0 -file kernels/generic.gz -flags "root=/dev/hda"

See the section on Section 5.6.1 conventions if you don't know what these are.

7.2.1. Installation from the SuSE 6.1 CD

The SuSE 6.1 CD is not bootable from SRM console. SuSE have an alternative approach which involves creating two boot floppies, the images of which are included on the CD. The boot disks can be created in various ways, depending on the systems you have available

Writing the boot disks from a linux system The command to use is dd. From the mount-point of SuSE CD 1, the commands are:

# dd if=disks/aboot of=/dev/fd0 # dd if=disks/install of=/dev/fd0

For writing the boot disks from a windows system, the command to use is rawrite. It is available on the CD.

D:\tools\> rawrite

The program then prompts for input disk image and output disk drive. Run this command once for each of the disk images as shown above.

Starting the SuSE installer from the boot disks With the floppy disk made from the aboot image in place, type:

>>> boot dva0 -file vmlinux.gz -flags "root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1"

This will start the kernel, prompt you for the second boot disk, and start the installer

7.3.1. Installation from the SuSE 6.3 CD

The SuSE 6.3 CD-ROM is SRM bootable much like the RedHat 6.0 and 6.1 CD-ROMs. The best way to start the install from SRM is to use the following command:

>>> boot srm-device -flags 0

In the above, the SRM device names for your CD-ROM drive is needed. For Example if the machine had an IDE cdrom installed as primary master the command would look like this:

>>> boot dqa0 -flags 0

SuSE has added support to aboot to allow it to load initrd files. The above command will from the CD-ROM drive and use config number 0 from the /etc/aboot.conf file. For other variations on this refer to the SuSE installation guide.