Re: Installing on a Headless PC?

[jereme <jereme@rmcnet.cc>]

Hi Ray,

Ray <tech13@powerweb.net> writes:
> can debian be installed on a headless pc? and if so, anyone know
> where a nice howto is?

Here is how I did it, (I just tried it as it seemed interesting).

I did it with floppies but a CD install would follow the same idea.

I grabbed the rescue.bin image from my debian-30r1-i386-binary-1 CD
and copied it to a free spot on my system.

I mounted it like so:
$ mount -o loop -t vfat  rescue.bin /mnt

Now you have a copy of the filesystem of the install boot disk mounted
on /mnt

Then I edited /mnt/syslinux.cfg, I changed two params, (have a look at 
/usr/share/doc/syslinux/syslinux.doc.gz for the whole story):

APPEND console=ttyS0 vga=normal noinitrd load_ramdisk=1 \
prompt_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=16384 root=/dev/fd0 disksize=1.44 
TIMEOUT 10

I added "console=ttyS0" to the APPEND directive so syslinux would boot
the kernel image with this additional option. This tells the kernel to
use the first serial port as the console.

I also changed the TIMEOUT from '0' to '10' lest the boot loader just
wait endless for input.

Then I unmounted the image and wrote it out to a floppy
dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/fd0

I connected to the serial port with minicom and continued with the
install, you will have to feed in the additional floppies, etc.

I should say that I did NOT finish the install as my interest was only
in this initial setup.  I have done numerous headless installs before
without trouble but IIRC they were primarily with console access
servers but I think a few were with minicom.

BTW, you will need a monitor to config your BIOS for a serial port and
the correct boot order.


hth,
jereme

-- 
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Jereme Corrado <jereme@restorative-management.com>
System Administrator
Restorative Management Corp.

gpg: 1024D/9C39E1F0