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I have an oldish box running fedora 2. I want to do a fresh install with fedora 10, but I do not have a screen/monitor for it (all my other machines are laptops).

To save buying a monitor, does anyone have any idea how I can install with no screen?

Thanks,

Don.

5 Answers 5

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You'll need to do a Kickstart to do this. It's a big pain in the butt, why not just borrow a monitor? surely you can find someone who has one.

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  • hi thanks for the advice. It's a trade off between lugging a monitor across town (london) vs software hassle. Looks like general consensus though is that the monitor option is probably easiest. Kickstart looks interesting though - but probably overkill for a single-server set up. Cheers.
    – Don
    Dec 12, 2008 at 18:13
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I know my distro has a net install method, might be worth looking into. Worse comes to worse, you can find a CRT on craigslist for cheap and/or free.

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It might just about be possible to do a terminal install using a null modem cable to one of your laptops.
But you are going to have to set the boot order in the bios etc, check POST errors so I would just borrow/buy a cheap crt.

Net install usually just means pulling the files over the net - useful if the machine doesn't have a cdrom, not controlling the install over the net.

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I did a remote install of centos a few months ago. Assuming you have ssh access and if you can get /etc/grub.conf to load the DVD install image, you can append the kernel line with

vnc vncconnect=xx.xx.xx.xx headless ip=dhcp ksdevice=eth0 

where xx.xx.xx.xx is the ip of the machine running the vnc client.

Then on the client machine, run

vncviewer -listen

Provided grub.conf loads the DVD w/ modified kernel args, anaconda (f10 install) will establish a vnc connection with the client computer.

If you don't have dhcp, there are additional kernel arguments:

ip=192.168.0.xx netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.0.1 dns=xx.xx.xx.xx hostname=localhost

I haven't tried this (did something similar with centos), but I believe that's the route you need to go. The crappy part is, if grub hangs, you'll probably have to hook up the monitor and keyboard.

More info here: fedoraproject.org: sn-remoteaccess-installation

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Check out system-config-kickstart

Its a GUI tool for making kickstart files, which can then be used to install machines headless.

EDIT:

If you already have a fedora/rhel/centos box, system-config-kickstart can be installed through yum

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