I gave up the idea of setting up Solaris as my home router/server OS. It seems that I don’t have enough RAM. Actually I have 512MB, and I’m able to install Solaris, but to comfort work it’s just too few.
And now I have Debian. It was quite an adventure. I didn’t want to turn off my PC to borrow
one of DVD drives, so I decided to install it from USB stick (pen drive). Ok… how? Simply copying data from ISO image is not enough.
First, prepare your USB drive. Unmount if mounted automatically. Then:
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo mkdosfs /dev/sda1
Make sure /dev/sda1 is actually your targeted USB device. Before above steps you can make sure wich /dev to use:
sudo mount
on the bottom you should see your device.
Install:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install syslinux mtools
Then:
syslinux /dev/sda1
Now download necessary files:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/20070308/images/hd-media/gtk/
and appropriate ISO image, eg:
http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/Linux/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r0-i386-kde-CD-1.iso
I have 1GB pen drive, so one CD fits for me, but you can choose smaller ISOs: netinst ot bussinescard.
Copy those files to your USB drive:
sudo copy source_file target_file
eg:
copy /tmp/downloads/vmlinuz /mnt/vmlinuz
Additionally you have to have syslinux configuration file:
sudo touch /mnt/syslinux.cfg
nano /mnt/syslinux.cfg
and paste the following:
default vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.gz
Your USB installation media is ready, unmount:
sudo umount /mnt
Set up BIOS on machine you’re about to install Debian to boot from USB-ZIP and you’re done.
NOTE: I didn’t use packages from ISO shown in example only. I’ve done mixed installation ISO + remote (network) repository (mirror). You will have this option available during your own installation so no additional steps in this how-to are necessary.
Bonus: graph showing network usage during Debian mixed installation.
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