Does your box have a serial port? Can it be configured to display the BIOS screen on the serial port? Can Debian be installed using a serial port? That is, connect a null-modem serial cable between the box to be installed and some other computer and use minicom (Linux) or Hyperterm (Win).
Or put the hard drive into another regular computer, install there, then move the drive back to the target box. And (1) enable a getty on /dev/ttyS0 and (2) add 'console=ttys0,115200' to grub. The only oddity you should encounter here is that the target box's NIC won't be eth0; this results from how udev works, but it can be changed if desired. Grub0 can be configured to poll both the VESA console and a serial port, then use whichever gets the first keystroke (or time out and use the selected default). I don't know how (or if) Grub2 handles this situation. So if the box has no drive and no VESA console and you cannot redirect the BIOS to a serial port, you'll be blind until grub starts. Another possibility. Check if the system has a compact flash socket. If so, you could effectively install a /boot to it with a custom initramfs that contains enough command line tools (and libs) to run a fairly minimal 'live' system in RAM; this might take a 100-300 MiB. As it boots, it can mount the rest of what it needs over the net. My firewall has a smallish initramfs (30MiB compressed CPIO, about 100MiB in RAM). It's a fairly fully usable environment with a real init and a few real tools with busybox handling others; I made it to ease debugging the install process. It works well on standard computers and works well on headless systems like the Lanner 7530 and 7539 network appliances using a serial console. You *can* do what you want, but it requires you to roll up your sleeves and get up to your elbows in slimy bits. But then, Debian might have something for this already. The hard part will be to redirect the install session to a serial port. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201211122157.39742.neal.p.mur...@alum.wpi.edu
