Slack pxeboot floppy install.

Caveat: Use at your own risk.

Though I use several versions of linux, I like to use Slackware on really old systems.  Generally those systems do not have cdrom and in some cases no usb. Slackare is so versatile that you can boot from just a floppy to install slackware via gpxe from the internet,  I did an install that way with 14.1 on a p1. Now to try this with slackware 14.2.  So far so good. You can do this on other versions of linux.

To me one of the most amazing things is to install linux from the internet instead of using local media. Generally if you wanted to do an install of linux, from the net, you would need a dhcp server and an tftp server with special settings. Gpxe gets around all those limitations. Quite often I will start a internet based install from a local web server. Now that the internet is slightly more dependable we can do an install from the host linux distribution sites. Today I will show you how to do it with Slackware 14.2.  More Information at etherboot.org.


The two files we really need are initrd.img and bzImage.  So it is a matter of finding these two files on the net specifically for Slackware 14.2. Once you have those two file locations, you can generate a script. To save time I just used the old script for Slackware 14.1 and went from there.

To use the script, you will need to create boot media.  In our case we will use a floppy.  To make the media, you want to go to romomatic,net.



You will want tp press the customize button to enter ion the script. Then enter your script and press get image. You will need a free floppy once you get the download. The you can use dd to copy the image to the disk.

#the script for slackware 14.2
#!ipx.e

dhcp any


initrd http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/slackware-14.2/isolinux/initrd.img


chain  http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/slackware-14.2/kernels/hugesmp.s/bzImage load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 rw printk.time=0 nomodeset SLACK_KERNEL=huge.s

Of course you can customize the script to your needs.

To test the script boot disk, I used Virtual box. Be sure to enable pae.


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