Prerequisites for installation

You will need these for your installation:

• A Live CD or another installation of the same version of the distribution to install
• A working internet connection to your target machine or a local mirror of your distribution

Note

If you plan to do a lot of sans-Anaconda installations with the same distribution, having a local mirror will prevent you from downloading the same data over and over again for each installation.

Why a Live CD?

In order for this to work, you need to already be running the distribution of your choice. The standard Anaconda installer image boots into a limited environment with the sole purpose of starting Anaconda and providing a minimal debug shell that doesn’t provide all the tools needed.

Some distributions don’t have a Live CD. The recommended way of handling this is to install from a computer that already has your target distribution installed. In general, you can get around this by finding a Live CD from a distribution very similar to the one you plan to install.

Downloading and using a Live CD

Googling the distribution’s name with “live” appended to it should make it fairly clear where to find a Live CD image. This image should have an .iso extension.

Using a Live USB

If your motherboard supports it and you have a USB drive, you can boot from that drive. For modern Live CD images, you can use a command similar to the following as root:

dd if=path/to/Live-CD.iso of=/dev/sdX

Warning

The above command will destroy information on a USB drive.

Check the documentation for your distribution for more information about using a Live USB.