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Linux Installation Kung Fu

I de­cid­ed to try Arch Lin­ux on my note­book. The rea­sons don't mat­ter.

How­ev­er, there was this prob­lem about the CD drive be­ing bro­ken, and the lack of a flop­py drive.

So, how did I do it?

I had a par­ti­tion I could de­stroy (/de­v/h­da3)

I in­stalled qe­mu.

Then, I start­ed qe­mu us­ing the whole HD and a CD ISO im­age (boot­ing from the CD!):

qemu -hda /dev/hda -cdrom arch-0.7.1.iso -boot d

Then, very care­ful­ly I in­stalled it on hda3 and did not in­stall GRUB.

Copied the ker­nel and ini­trd im­ages to /boot on the oth­er lin­ux in­stal­la­tion.

Edit­ed grub.­con­f, adding the Arch en­try...

And it worked.

Keep in mind that if you make a mis­take, this will com­plete­ly de­stroy all your da­ta. But if you are care­ful, and have enough space, you can in­stall your next Lin­ux while you use your cur­rent one.

Now, is that cool or what? :-)

thenub / 2006-08-18 09:33:

Perhaps you could have just tried this?
http://wiki.archlinux.org/i...

Roberto Alsina / 2006-08-18 12:36:

I like my way better.

1) It works for any distro.

2) You install using the regular installer for the distro you want

3) It's slightly dangerous

4) It was my idea ;-)

Saua / 2006-08-18 14:10:

Me likes :-)

While there are custom ways to install while running another system for some distributions (debootsrap comes to my mind for Debian/Ubuntu/...) this is probably the way with the highest geek value.

IceRAM / 2006-08-19 12:54:

Why 0.7.1?

There are huge differences between 0.7.1 and 0.7.2 as far as I remember (udev, glibc etc.).

-- a happy ArchLinux user

Roberto Alsina / 2006-08-19 22:20:

There was no 0.7.2 ISO except via torrent, and those were giving me an error.

But anyway, pacman handled it.


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