wow you guys are awesome :) Some interesting ideas and thoughts. I canīt use local media like USB or CD/DVD cause I have no physical access to the VPS. I will check for remote console access. I think I saw something like that in my control panel. As you thought I have no swap. Even at home I donīt use any with 8gigs RAM. I read it is faster. The weekend is near and I will use your thoughts to try some things and let you know if I Had success or need more help. Have a nice day :)Michael ________________________________ Von: Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> An: Tom H <[log in to unmask]> CC: SL Users <[log in to unmask]> Gesendet: 14:56 Freitag, 22.Juni 2012 Betreff: Re: Install SL out of another linux on a VPS On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Tom H <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Adam Bishop <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >>> >>> 1) Disable the old OS's swap partition >>> 2) DD the install DVD to the former swap partition >> >> I'm going to be *really surpised* if you've got a swap space big >> enough for a 4.7 Gig DVD image. > > Thought the same when I read this but the boot iso should fit in. True. Some folks don't use swap partitions, especially in "VPS" setups. They cost disk space and swap space can be created as files when needed without having to reserve a partition. And network traffic can cost money on VPS's, too. If you're a complete weasel, you can do what I did in 2001: Build a stripped down base OS image on a local disk, or these days on a local virtual image. Turn if off, and rsyinc it *all* to a working directory, except for sytem mount points like "/proc" and "/sys" In the directory, use "chroot" to enter it and edit local settings. Especially modprobe.conf to load all the necessary drivers and build a new initrd.img. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts to define your network settings and avoid locking network ports to specific MAC acddresses. Tarball up the image. Transmit the *tarball*, which is *much smaller* than installation media, to the remote server. Disable swap and format the swap partition. Put the image in the swap partition. Use chroot inside the swap partition to install a new boot loader with grub. This is the delicate and dangerous part!!!!! Reboot to the tarball based image. Unfortunately, grub does not have the LILO feature of "set the default sttings to the old option, but boot the next time only with these new settings", so my old failure recover trick for these setups and for kernel updates doesn't work any longer. I miss that LILO setting, it saved my bacon a few times when new kernels had some very strange disc ordering issues or driver issues with some of the weirder hardware. I did this to 15,000 corporate servers in one month in 2001, servers with heavily customized kernels and some very odd dual-boot setups for Windows. Using the sripped tarballs instead of installation media let me shrink the transmitted data down to 100 MBytes and install to remote sites with 1000 msec ping times. (Someone had cut one of the trans-atlantic cables to China, so bandwidth to some hosts was horrible.) And it is *MUCH*, *MUCH*, *MUCH* faster than anything that relies on anaconda for the initial package management and installation.