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[Gagle]

Hi,
I've been trying to install VL on my old laptop.  The Floppy install failed for the usb cd-rom wasn't detected (even using the smartbootmanager....). 
I'm now trying to use the install script to start the installation from my Edgy partition. 

The problem is that every time I execute the script, it tells me "ERROR : must run as root"

This is how I proceeded:

1. Activate a root account. (Debian distros don't always have an activated root account)
2.logout from my graphical X session.
3.[Ctrl-Alt-F1] my way to a command line session.
4. login as root.
5.go to the directory where is stored the .iso and the install script.
6. typed <init 2>
7. execute the script this way :  ./vinstall-iso VL-5.8-std-Gold.iso

and then I get the error mentioned before.

Now, I know maybe the script permission is causing problems.. i really don't know for I am quite a n00b with Linux.
If I execute this command; < ls -l > ; I get this result :

-rwxrwxr-x 1 gagle gagle   [.......]  vinstall-iso
-rwxrwxr-x 1 gagle gagle   [.......]  VL-5.8-std-Gold.iso

where [......] are irrelevant infos(date and size) and gagle is my user name, that hasn't anything to do with my root acount.
That's why I am led to think there is a permission problem and I don't know how to use chmod intelligently.

Thx

[saulgoode]

Can you provide the number output if you execute the following command after Step 5?

echo $UID

If it is not "0" then you have not really created a true 'root' account, you have just created an account named "root" that has SUDOERS privileges.

[Gagle]

I know what you mean.  I am root.  It outputs '0'  and even specifies root account if I do another similar command.
That is what freaks me out. 
I must've done something dumb regarding the script. 
Is there a way to save and execute a script, or give it executable properties using chmod ?   

Any ideas why it doesn't work ?

[uelsk8s]

its not the permissions they are set to executable.
try commenting out the section of the script that checks for root user

[saulgoode]

Here is what I did to install the latest SOHO ISO. I started with four partitions: HDA1 was my Slackware partition which I was running as I performed all of this; HDA2 was the partition to which I was installing Vector; HDA3 was a data partition which was completely ignored; and HDA4 was my swap partition.

First we need to extract the 'initrd' from the ISO.

Code:

mkdir VL-MOUNT
mount VL5.8-SOHO-final.iso VL-MOUNT/ -o loop -v
cp -v VL-MOUNT/isolinux/initrd.img initrd.img.gz
gunzip initrd.img.gz
umount VL-MOUNT

The above code will mount the ISO as a "loop" device. This means that, once mounted, you can access the contents of the ISO just as though it were a disk drive. "VL-MOUNT" is just an arbitrary name for the mount point. The file, "initrd.img" on the ISO is actually a GZIPped file, so we unzip it after we have extracted it from the ISO. After the file is extracted, I unmounted the VL-MOUNT directory so that I could re-use it (alternately, I could have used a different mount point for the following commands).

Now we are going to mount the extracted 'initrd' filesystem (again, as a loop device) and mirror some of the current system directories so they will be available to the "setup" program later on.

Code:

mount initrd.img VL-MOUNT/ -o loop -v
mount /proc VL-MOUNT/proc/ -o bind -v
mount /dev VL-MOUNT/dev/ -o bind -v
mount /sys VL-MOUNT/sys/ -o bind -v

We are now going to mount the original ISO onto the initrd filesystem so that the setup program will be able to access the files on it.

Code:

mount VL5.8-SOHO-final.iso VL-MOUNT/mnt/source/ -o loop -v

Next, we must prepare a mount table for the initrd so that it knows where the active root system is (if you wished, you could use a text editor to create the file). The "/dev/hda1" is the system root partition at the time you perform these commands.

Code:

echo "/dev/hda1 / auto defaults 0 1" >VL-MOUNT/etc/mtab
echo "none /proc proc defaults 0 0" >>VL-MOUNT/etc/mtab

Everything is ready to 'chroot' to the initrd directory and perform the setup. HDA1 and HDA3 are excluded from the setup so that they are not accidentally destroyed.

Code:

EXCLUDE_PARTITIONS="/dev/hda1 /dev/hda3" chroot VL-MOUNT/ /usr/sbin/setup --hosted