[conspire] need assistance installing Fedora-10 on laptop from ISO on external hard drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

> I tried booting from a Fedora-9 live CD and a Fedora-9 install DVD but I
> didn't see an opportunity to type "linux askmethod"

See, even if you were able to figure that out, you'd be in the early
stages of the Fedora _9_ installer.

> I want to install Fedora-10 today so I can install Kdenlive for the PenLUG
> meeting on Thu, 26th March - nothing like waiting until the last minute.

OK, I hope the external Firewire drive (Jeez, Firewire, too!  That's
going to make matters even more failure-prone, just because you're not
in the Linux mainstream) is formatted to either ext2, ext3, or vfat.  It
can't be, for example, NTFS.

_If_ you have managed to boot the Fedora 10 installer program from
somewhere, and _if_ that installation kernel/initramfs includes the
necessary Firewire support, then this page tells how to proceed:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/sn-installing-from-harddrive.html

That leaves the question of how to start the Fedora 10 installer.  _If_
you can locate a public NFS mirror (good luck with that), then:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/sn-nfs-install-settings.html

You might have an easier time with direct http/ftp installation (but
then mounting the ISO locally, as above), rather than attempting NFS 
for the first bit:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/sn-url-install-settings.html

My recollection is that you have to play around quite a bit to get the
directory spec correct (within the Web or ftp tree).

_But_, first of all, you need to boot a suitable Linux kernel and
initramfs to bootstrap network installation of the rest.  Which is where
you're probably, mildly screwed.  _If_ you had a local PXEboot server
(DHCP and tftp daemons), you could netboot such an image, e.g., the
Fedora Net Install ISO.  But you don't.  So, I think you're stuck.

(Alternatively, if you had the Fedora Net Install ISO as a physical CD,
you could just boot that, but you say you don't have a burner.
Actually, if you have a _CD_ burner, but just not a DVD one, that's what
you should do.)

In a bygone era of Linux (middle '90s), much more effort typically went
into making sure distros' network installation methods were both well
tested and well documented.  These days, it's not unheard of for
particular distro releases to make it out the door with some of their 
network-installation support broken -- but not Fedora/RHEL lately,
because of the popularity of kickstart.

But what I'm saying is, don't expect them to have made it easy, because
it's been relegated to being a "expert" topic.