Masa's Journal: Headless Install

Last weekend I upgraded my Linux firewall from Slackware 9.0 to Slackware 10.0. The problem was, I don't have a monitor. And this upgrade process included replacing a harddrive and partitioning and formatting it, so upgrade over the network connection wasn't an option. Only tools I had at hand were a keyboard and a CD-ROM drive. So, what to do?

1. Plug in the keyboard.
2. Get a bootable Slackware CD.
3. Insert the CD and boot the machine with it.
4. Get and install the Bochs at your other machine.
5. Create a disk image for Bochs with identical geometry information as your new hard drive.
6. Start Slackware installation from the CD ISO image at the Bochs.
7. Do all required steps at the Bochs environment and mimic all key presses with your headless box.
8. Remember to carefully configure the network connetion and leave the sshd on.
9. Reboot and log in to the freshly installed Slackware box over the SSH connection.
10. Finish the installation and configuration over the SSH.

And that's it. Smooth installation, which reminded me, why command line user interface is so cool. With graphical installer this kind of thing would not be as easy to pull through.

Afterwards I realised, that it would have been so much easier to just plug in the new hard drive as a slave and partition it and install the base system and then switch the drives and finish the configuration. Oh well, at least the experience was cool and I learned a lot how to use and configure a computer blindly.