Installing gentoo over local network

entity

I was just wondering would it be possible to do network install like this to avoid painfully long compiling:

1. create a boot floppy/cdrom with networking support (nfs)
2. format the filesystem of slower computer (if necessary) and mount root to, for example, /mnt/fs.
3. share the root of slower computer ( /mnt/fs ) with nfs and mount it on some other (faster) computer where you would chroot to it and compile/install system.

have I gone totally haywire when suggesting something like this? Comments, please.
:wink:

Chris W · Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 9:51 am Post subject:

Possible? Probably.

If you are purely after a faster compile cycle then you'll be losing quite a bit in accessing files across NFS. I dread to think how slow emerge dependency checking would be - many small files to scan. Why not build up a set of binary packages on the fast machine using local storage, and SCP, or CDROM them across to a base Gentoo setup?
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entity · Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 10:06 am Post subject:

Since the slower computer would have totally empty hd, I guess dependency check would be quite fast...

But you've got a point there, pre-building binary packages sounds good.

delta407 · Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 1:25 pm Post subject:

I've done something similar using VMware; it's not that bad, really. See this thread for details.
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entity · Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 1:48 pm Post subject:

now THAT's a wicked way to do it delta407,

respect!