15. Installing RedHat 7.0

This section is written by Leonard den Ottolander

To install RedHat 7.0 over PLIP the easiest way to go is to use a patched bootnet.img which is available via the url http://home.hetnet.nl/~ottolander. This saves the need for a driver disk, which might be useful when installing on a machine which floppy drive stops functioning after boot (I made this bootnet-plip.img to do an install to a Toshiba Libretto 30 which has a funny PCMCIA floppy drive that is no longer available after boot).

This disk is a full bootnet.img for RedHat 7.0, with the modules necessary for PLIP added to it. Since there was enough disk space, no modules had to be deleted. So you can use this image as if it were a full featured bootnet.img. No need for different disks.

I am not going into detail on the actual installation procedure, but there are a few things to note:

• The parport module should be loaded before the PLIP module. Specify i/o address and irq parameters for the parallel port when inserting the parallel port module.

• After inserting the parport_pc module the installer will show the "Installation method" screen a second time. This is expected behaviour. Choose the PLIP module this second time. No parameters need to be specified when inserting the PLIP module.

• When specifying network parameters, do not use a netmask of 255.255.255.255 as you might normally do for a PLIP connection. If you do this by accident you will have to reboot to be able to mount the installation directory succesfully. Going back and respecifying the parameters will not help you out.

• When doing an NFS install with RedHat 7.0 make sure all files from the RedHat directories from both CD's are copied to the NFS mount point (cp -a RedHat for both CD's). It is not possible to use the mounted CD's.

15.1 Creating your own bootnet-plip disk

This section is a slightly adapted copy of the procedure to create a bootnet-plip image for RedHat 6.2 described by Tilmann Bubeck. Thanx Tilmann!

• 1) Mount a copy of the standard bootnet disk and copy all files to a temporary directory:

          mount -o loop -t vfat /tmp/bootnet.img /mnt/bootnet
          cp -a /mnt/bootnet /tmp
         
  

• 2) Gunzip the initial ramdisk, mount it and copy all files to a temporary directory:

          mv /tmp/bootnet/initrd.img /tmp/bootnet/initrd.gz
          gzip -d /tmp/bootnet/initrd.gz
          mount -o loop /tmp/bootnet/initrd /mnt/initrd
          cp -a /mnt/initrd /tmp
         
  

• 3) Gunzip and extract the modules directory with:

          cd /tmp
          zcat /tmp/initrd/modules/modules.cgz | cpio -ivd 
         
  

• 4) Install the kernel-BOOT-2.2.16-22 rpm and copy the modules parport.o, parport_pc.o and plip.o from /lib/modules/2.2.16-22BOOT to /tmp/2.2.16-22BOOT, or use the midnight commander to extract these files from rpm. When building modified boot disks you will always need the modules from the kernel-BOOT rpm.

• 5) If you need additional space on your bootnet-plip disk, delete an unused module from the modules directory, fe:

          rm /tmp/2.2.16-22BOOT/old_tulip.o
         
  

  Note that this is not necessary for the RedHat 7.0 bootnet disk. There is enough space left for the added modules. Do *not* delete modules like sunrpc.o, lockd.o, nfs.o, fat.o, vfat.o and the like. This will make your disk useless. Use common sense.

• 6) Rebuild the modules archive:

          find /tmp/2.2.16-22BOOT | cpio -ov -H crc | gzip > \
          /tmp/initrd/modules/modules.cgz 
         
  

• 7) Insert a new modules dependency line into modules.dep saying that module "parport_pc" needs module "parport":

          echo "parport_pc: parport" >> /tmp/initrd/modules/modules.dep 
         
  

• 8) Insert entries for the parport_pc and plip modules into module-info. These entries should look like this:

      parport_pc
          plip
          "Parallel Port, Insert Before PLIP"
          io "Base I/O address"
          irq "IRQ level"
      plip
          plip
          "PLIP (Parallel Link Interface Protocol)"
          io "Base I/O address"
          irq "IRQ level"
        
  

  You probably may omit the io and irq entries for plip. Also delete any entries that refer to modules that you removed from the archive (ie old_tulip in the previous example).

• 9) Copy the modified module files to the initial ramdisk:

         cp -a /tmp/initrd/modules/module* /mnt/initrd/modules
         
  

• 10) Unmount and gzip the initial ramdisk and copy it to the disk image:

          umount /mnt/initrd
          gzip -9 /tmp/bootnet/initrd
          cp /tmp/bootnet/initrd.gz /mnt/bootnet/initrd.img
          umount /mnt/bootnet
         
  

• 11) The file /tmp/bootnet.img is now your new bootnet-plip.img. You might want to clean up your temporary files:

          rm -r /tmp/2.2.16-22BOOT
          rm -r /tmp/initrd
          rm -r /tmp/bootnet