CDs DVDs or netboot. Oh my!

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 09:19 -0500, Jima wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le mercredi 10 octobre 2007 à 21:36 -0500, Michael Stahnke a écrit :
> >> I really think an upgrade path for the casual user is required.
> >
> > Unless they've been dunked, network install/updates should fit the bill
> 
>   I forget if this ever went anywhere, but I remember some time ago someone 
> suggesting that we should have an installable package that would plop 
> (essentially) the kernel image and initrd from the boot.iso into /boot, 
> and add an entry into grub.conf for the next release's installer.  No 
> CD/DVD required, no mucking around to figure out how to get your machine 
> to boot to the optical drive...it'd be just the same as a network 
> install/upgrade.  As Matt Domsch pointed out, it could even use our 
> mirrorlist infrastructure to pick the download source.  We could even 
> include the stage2.img (optionally, with a non-dependent subpackage that 
> would pull in the main one).  It would handle the 
> wants-to-upgrade-but-not-use-yum segment nicely, IMO.
>   Alas, I don't remember if this ever got off the ground.  Sure seems like 
> a nice potential target for F-9.

Some bits got done here, others didn't.  Seth has the start of the
script to pre-download all of the packages as well as the kernel and
initrd to set this up.  You still then need to download stage2 from
anaconda (or boot off of the rescuecd), but the packages will get
preferred from the lookaside path on the rootfs.

Definitely could use some more testing, though.

Jeremy