2013/06/23

mini howto installing slackware from a samba share

the goal is to mount an iso image of the dvd from a samba share. Slackware setup have some network drivers already loaded in the kernel. If you can do ifconfig and see your network card, why not use it to speed up installation process?

#setup network card IP, you must use an IP within your network range.
ifconfig eth0 192.168.111.222

Make sure the smb share is configured for public access in the remote machine.

in the example it's named "test", remote IP 192.168.111.3

And then follow the SOP for re/partitioning

and then (let's suppose the installdvd.iso is on the root of the share on the remote machine):

mkdir /test
mkdir /image
mount //192.168.111.3/test /test -o guest -t cifs
cd /test
#at this point you should be able to do ls and see the remote dir
mount -o loop installdvd.iso /image
#at this point you should be able to do ls /image/slackware and see the install iso content.


run setup and when selecting "Source", select "From Pre-Mounted Directory", and write

sometimes, for some odd reason, setup might umount the iso and the network share, in case of doubt press Alt F2 and check with mount.

/image/slackware

and that should do the trick.