Installing without external drives or USB sticks

I haven't seen this mentioned on the forums--if it has been, and I've missed it, apologies.

I just came across it today in two separate places, and thought it worth posting.

If you have an existing Linux installation, you can boot some Linux Live CDs without anything other than what's on the Aspire one. It doesn't work for all distributions. I've only played with it briefly, and it worked with Sidux and AntiX (a lighter version of Mepis).

http://manual.sidux.com/en/hd-install-o ... tm#fromiso

is a link to the Sidux manual, which goes through the process. In short (please read the link above and/or the AntiX one at

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Installation_Tips

In short (this is only a summary, not a howto)
Mount the CD with -o loop somewhere so that you can grab some files from it.
Get the /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd (which might be gz or img or the like) from the mounted CD and save them somewhere.
Then, make a directory, for example, one called sidux. Copy the iso AND the two files you grabbed from it, the vmlinuz and initrd. If they have long kernel names after them, it's fine to rename them to vmlinuz and initrd.img.

So, you now have, in this example, a directory called sidux on /dev/sda2. (I imagine this could be done on the SSD drives as well, but in this case, I'm using a hard drive.) It has three files, one called sidux.iso, one called vmlinuz and one called initrd.img.

IMPORTANT NOTE--if you're doing this on a machine that already has Linpus preinstalled, sda2 would be the swap partition. Although I use it in this example, DO NOT USE THE SWAP PARTITION FOR THIS! (Thanks to rbil who pointed that out below--I edited this post after reading his.)

Now create a grub entry
title Sidux livecd
kernel (hd0,1)/sidux/vmlinuz boot=fll quiet fromiso=/sidux/sidux.iso
initrd (hd0,1)/sidux/initrd.img

You'll be able to boot the CD.
This doesn't work with all distributions. For instance, I tried with Mandriva without success. However, I suspect it will work with all of those where the live CD has an initrd and vmlinuz file directly in /boot.

(For the record, Sidux ran well, detecting the wireless, AntiX had trouble with the video.)

 

For the record /dev/sda2 is the swap partition on these Linpus computers.

Cheers.

 

In case anyone who comes across this doesn't realize it, do NOT try to install (or even copy the directory with the iso and other files) to the swap partition.

rbil thanks for pointing that out. I don't have the 8 gig version--I'll edit the first post to make sure no one tries it.