Tutorial: Minimal Install Fedora 18 How To Guide

How To: Install Fedora 18 Minimal Installation

 

Do you find that most the programs that are installed on your system, you never use? If you answered yes, then this guide would be good for you if you are considering installing Fedora 18. It gives you the power to only install what you use, avoiding over bloating your system.

 

Installing Fedora 18 as a minimal installation is my preferred way of installing this distribution. This option has been available with Red Hat and Fedora for a long time as I remember it from the first time I started using Red Hat. It may not be an option given with the Live Media they provide now, but it is available with the DVD and the Network Install CD.

 

Note: While reading the Fedora 18 documentation about minimal installs, it talks about downloading boot.iso for the minimal install. This boot.iso does not seemed to be mirrored by anyone except from the official Fedora download server. I was quite disappointed when I found out that it has the same checksum as the Network Install CD. So if anyone else is looking for boot.iso, it is the Network Install CD which is mirrored by most mirrors and not difficult to track down. I hope Fedora get round to fixing their documentation, as I felt their documentation may not have reliable instructions.

 

What You Need

Reliable Internet Connection if you choose Fedora 18 Network Install

Fedora 18 Network Install CD or Fedora 18 DVD

Media like a USB Stick (larger than the ISO size) or blank writable CD-ROM/DVD

A lot of time

First Download Fedora 18 DVD or Network Install CD

 

Just go and find Fedora 18 DVD or the Network Install CD and then download whichever one is compatible with your computer. I am using 64-bit. The Network Install ISO image size is about 294MB and the DVD is 4.3GB. If you don't know what architecture your system is, you can find the help guide just below the download links to help you identify which one you may require.

 

If you download the Network Install CD you will require an internet connection, as it downloads the latest software to install with while the DVD just uses what's on the DVD so you do not need to download them. Preferably the Network Install CD is better because you do not need to do an update as you will be working with the latest packages. If you do the DVD install, it's recommended to download the updates afterwards. So the choice is yours, whichever you choose.

 

Write or Burn it to Your Media

 

If you are using a USB stick, everything will be erased on it in my steps. The USB stick needs to be at least 300MB for the Network Install CD (really it only needs to be the size of the ISO but more is better) or larger than 4.3GB for the DVD. You will require the tool dd (disk dump) which should be standard on Linux and can be downloaded for windows. Now I'm using dd because the manual suggests that you use LiveUSB Creator tool only for Live Media which Network Install CD or DVD are not. The documentation maybe out of date too and it might be possible to use LiveUSB Creator tool but I did not risk it. From here on, my instructions are Linux specific because that's what I'm running on.

 

Learn How To Detect Your USB Device

 

First plug your USB device into the computer. Inside a terminal run:

dmesg | tail

and make note of the device inside the square brackets in the middle of the line. An example of what you could see:

[ 4037.909898] sd 6:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk

This shows that my device is [sde], so my USB stick device is /dev/sde and first partition of this device would be /dev/sde1 so be sure to know the difference between device and partition as this is important when following these steps.

 

Learn How To Delete/Create Partitions using fdisk

 

Now if you're familiar with using gparted, you can use that but since I don't have gparted installed I am going to show you how to do partitioning using fdisk which is also standard on Linux. Please remember to change /dev/sde or /dev/sde1 to your device/partition. So here goes the instructions:

 

First you need to make sure it's not mounted:

sudo umount /dev/sde1

Then run:

sudo fdisk /dev/sde

 

Then at the fdisk prompt, type p and hit Enter to display the partitions.

 

Now depending on how many partitions are shown we want to remove them all so press d and hit Enter then the partition number you want to remove, if you only have 1 partition it will remove it without needing the number to be entered. Repeat this until all partitions are removed.

 

We need to create a new partition now, so press n and hit Enter. The default partition type should be primary so just hit Enter to continue. The default partition number should 1 (one) so hit Enter to continue. The First sector and Last sector should be fine as they are default, so hit Enter pass these two and you should now have 1 partition created.

 

Now we need to change the partition type, press t and enter than press c and Enter to change it to FAT 32 (LBA).

 

After this is done. Hit wq then Enter to write changes and quit.

 

Learn How To Format vfat/fat32

 

To format you USB device, you do mkfs.vfat -n "USBLabel" /dev/sde1

 

Change “USBLabel” to whatever name label you want to call your device.

 

Learn How To Check That The Above Steps Worked

 

If you followed the above fdisk and mkfs.vfat instructions then you should be fine to go ahead but just to be sure, lets check to make sure that our above steps worked.

 

So do:

 

sudo blkid /dev/sde1

And if your output has the label name you wanted and also the type is VFAT then everything is correct. If not, we can still continue with the writing to the USB stick but we need to clear the first 100MB blocks on the device. To do this we do:

 

Warning: Incorrect partition can have damaging results, ensure your partition is correct change /dev/sde1 to your correct partition.

 

This uses partition.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde1 bs=1M count=100

Learn How To Write To Your USB Stick

 

Remember where you downloaded the Network Install CD or DVD? e.g. ~/Downloads

 

Then do:

 

Warning: Incorrect device can have damaging results, ensure your device is correct change /dev/sde to your correct device.

 

This uses device.

dd if=~/Downloads/Fedora-18-x86_64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sde

or

 

dd if=~/Downloads/Fedora-18-x86_64-DVD.iso of=/dev/sde

Once this is done, it's now time to reboot your computer and boot from your USB device.

 

Now The Actual Installation Process With Screen Shots

 

For the next steps I'll be using the DVD version, because I have already done this install I do not want to download the packages again but the instructions are pretty much the same. In this I am testing out gnome-boxes as a virtualisation manager, it's my first time but so far I'm impressed with it and will talk more about it in another tutorial. So Lets begin.

 

00 - Fedora 18 First Boot Screen by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Select Install Fedora and press Enter

 

01 - Fedora 18 Language Selection by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Choose your Language and hit Continue

 

02 - Fedora 18 Installation Summary by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

This is the installation Summary Screen, where you will do most of your configurations. If you need to change your Keyboard or Network, do it now as I do not change the default settings for this.

 

03 - Fedora 18 Date & Time by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Select your Region and City, alternatively click where you live. You can also disable NTP and configure your time manually if you wish to do so, otherwise leave it enable so it will synchronise over the internet. Click Done to complete.

 

04 - Fedora 18 Software Selection Screen by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Go to Software Selection Screen

 

05 - Fedora 18 Software Selection Minimal Install Selected by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Scroll to the bottom of Environment and Select Minimal Install and then click Done.

 

06 - Fedora 18 Installation Destination by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Go to Installation Destination, Select your Hard Drive you would like to do the installation on.

 

07 - Fedora 18 Installation Destination Selected Disk by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

 

This step can be skipped if you just want the default of the boot loader being installed.

 

Click on Full disk summary, just to see how it is set up for booting, if you need a boot loader installed, this is where you can set it. Click on Close

 

08 - Fedora Installation Options Installation Destination by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Click on Continue.

 

09 - Fedora 18 Expanded Partition Scheme Installation Options by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Expand the Partition Scheme and choose your Partition type.

 

10 - Fedora 18 BTRFS Partition Type Selected by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

I chose BTRFS as it is newer than LVM/ext4 and has a lot of features worth having. You can also organise your partitions here in which I do not go into detail as this is a virtual hard drive, so it's got no partitions and all available space will be used.

 

11 - Fedora 18 Installation Summary, All Options Satisfied by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Now we are ready to click Begin Installation as we have no warnings stopping us.

 

12 - Fedora 18 Configuration by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

While it's installing it wants us to Set a Root password, so click on that now.

 

13 - Fedora 18 Root Password by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Type in your password. This will be the password for "root". Do not forget this as we will need it later.

 

14 - Fedora 18 Root Password Set by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Now our password is set.

 

15 - Fedora 18 Installation Complete by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

When the installation is finished we can now reboot.

 

16 - Fedora 18 Grub Boot Menu by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

This is the grub boot menu, it'll automatically count down to start Fedora. Hit Enter to speed the process up.

 

17 - Fedora 18 Terminal (tty1) Login Screen by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

This is the Terminal tty1 Login Screen, type root press Enter and then type your root password that you set.

 

18 - Fedora 18 Logged in by mastercomputers, on Flickr

 

Congratulations you have just finished the minimal install.

 

What is left now is setting up your minimal installation, adding and configuring your users, installing software you will need etc. Stay tuned for my next tutorial in which I will show you how to add users, install software, including GNOME 3 to get us a GUI and then build from that only installing software that we want.

 

Cheers,

 

MC

dd if=~/Downloads/Fedora-18-x86_64-DVD.iso of=/dev/sde

Is it as simple as that? A simple dd is enough ?
If I want to install something else, simply dd the new iso again?
And does that mean that the iso disc structure is naturally recognized by the usb device, the usb stick being seen as a DVD ?
Seems also that we are lucky, the default block size is suitable for that purpose, I would have added at least "bs=4k" at the end of the dd command.

You could use bs=4K if you want to it will speed it up. The default 512 bytes is being used if it is left out. The structure of the USB will now be iso9960 which is the CD's file system which makes the vfat partition, etc pretty irrelevant but I added it because it's handy to know. You can use this method on most bootable media if you are wanting to boot from it. You can also use it on non-bootable media, if you want to just use the USB like a CD.It's the OS that will detect the structure and know what to do with it, whether it be the BIOS or Linux, etc. There are many ways to use dd, even extracting it to a folder. It will still consider it a USB device but it'll have an iso9960 structure to it.Cheers,MC