SliTaz Forum

Deagon

Member

Registered: 2012-10-03

Posts: 4

Installing from usb/pxe without needing unetbootin or downloaded slitaz iso.

Tonight i spent many hours trying to figure out a way to install slitaz to my Asus Eee pc 901 with no blank cds or cdrom drive, everything i tried failed. I wont cover the many things that failed, but when i used unetbootin i found that the slitaz kernel panic's and the gpxe on the slitaz iso has no hardware support for my netbook...so 'webboot' simply wouldn't work in my instance.

so after hours of 'faffing' around i came up with what i think is a near foolproof way to boot some slitaz flavours with merely a pendrive & ethernet.

the following assumes you are setting up from a linux machine.

Stage 1: preparing the drive

1. go to http://ipxe.org/ and download the prebuilt iso (or here's a direct link http://boot.ipxe.org/ipxe.iso)

2. open a terminal and switch to root ("su root" or "sudo -i" or "su -")

3. confirm your usb device "fdisk -l" (for me it was /dev/sdc)

4. change directory to where you downloaded the iso. example: "cd /home/user/Downloads"

5. use dd to write the image to your drive "dd if=ipxe.iso of=/dev/sdX" <--- my 'of' variable was /dev/sdc

6. eject the drive "eject /dev/sdX"

Stage 2: preparing your machine

1. ideally connect an ethernet cable to your machine, im not sure if this will work with wifi.

2. ? (i cant possibly document every possible setup here as it just varies too much from one bios/efi to another. However in my instance i needed to enable the pxe device in my asus eee pc bios then simply skip past it's config prompt on boot, using the usbdrive instead otherwise i couldnt complete dhcp.)

Stage 3. booting

1. upon booting your usb device quickly press ctrl+b to get the command prompt

2. enter "dhcp net0" to obtain an ip address

3. boot the iso directly from mirror.slitaz.org "sanboot http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/4.0/slitaz-4.0.iso"

4. select "slitaz live" or whatever you fancy.

5. wait.......

Optional Stage 4. installation, etc

1. when in the slitaz installer select "web" as your source since you don't have a cdrom or live usb.

2. for me i found that slitaz was setting my usb device as /dev/sda and even after fixing grub, my newly installed system always had a kernel panic booting. I removed the usb device after issuing the 'sanboot' command, having reached the slitaz menu to get around this.

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: Installing from usb/pxe without needing unetbootin or downloaded slitaz iso.

Or just use the slitaz core iso with programs like Unetbootin.

http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/stable/flavors/

Deagon

Member

Registered: 2012-10-03

Posts: 4

Re: Installing from usb/pxe without needing unetbootin or downloaded slitaz iso.

i agree with you, definitely an easier/quicker for most but one of the things that wouldn't work for me im afraid. upon booting my pen drive was seen as /dev/sda and my ssd as /dev/sdb. after install, correcting grub and fstab i was left with a system that would only kernel panic on boot. Theres probably a way to that fix situation but i didnt spend any real time on it.

Deagon

Member

Registered: 2012-10-03

Posts: 4

Re: Installing from usb/pxe without needing unetbootin or downloaded slitaz iso.

actually, trixar. i can remember you from the old slitaz forums a couple of years back and found you seemed to be quite informed in your answers, can i possible ask you for assistance in a particular problem with my asus eee pc 901 upon which i have no idea how to solve? so far the only distribution i have really ran on this system has been linux mint xfce with pulse audio. which was laggy at best without me effectively tearing the operating system to pieces. hence why i went to such effort to install slitaz to this 1.6ghz, 2gb ram system. however, i now find that in this system i have no audio what so ever in slitaz and after issuing "alsactl restore" all i get is crackling. i will add lspci data later as this machine was left at a mates by mistake. although im fairly certain its soundcard is some variation of the intel hd ich7 chipset.

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: Installing from usb/pxe without needing unetbootin or downloaded slitaz iso.

My friend who moved to Ubuntu recently had a similar issue with ALSA (he did built it up using Ubuntu Mini). Not sure how he solved it, but I'll ask him next time I see him.

Deagon

Member

Registered: 2012-10-03

Posts: 4

Re: Installing from usb/pxe without needing unetbootin or downloaded slitaz iso.

finally figured it out, the hissing stops when i unmute the 'beep' channel in alsamixer. god knows why but im not complaining.

***EDIT***

I put "amixer sset 'Beep' 0% unmute &> /dev/null" into /etc/rc.local to keep its setting after reboots and stop my asus eee pc 901 from making a hissing noise with slitaz.