1.9 Install from a LiveCD¶

• 1.9 Install from a LiveCD
• Burning the image to a CD or a DVD
• growisofs
• K3B
• Boot options
• Partitioning

If your computer has a CD/DVD-drive, you can use our LiveCD for installation. The boot disk is an exact copy of the target system and you can see how the distribution works immediately after booting from the disk.

You can download Calculate images here. It is possible either to use a BitTorrent client or download directly from our HTTP/FTP mirrors.

Burning the image to a CD or a DVD¶

Depending on the image size, you will need either a CD or a DVD.

The examples below show how to use growisofs and K3B, which are part of CLD.

growisofs¶

To burn the downloaded image to a disk, you should enter something like this:

growisofs -Z /dev/cdrom=/usr/calculate/share/linux/cld-13.6-i686.iso

In this example, the ISO file is located in the directory /usr/calculate/share/linux.

K3B¶

Select Tools » CD » Burn Image and indicate the path to your ISO-file in the Image to Burn field. Then click on Start.

When booting from the installation disk, you might have to perform certain actions. Remove all CDs from your CD-drives, reboot your computer and enter BIOS. Usually you will need to hit DEL, F1 or ESC_depending on your _BIOS version. Once in BIOS, change the boot order so as CD-ROM becomes the first boot device (or it should at least come before the hard disk). This parameter is often specified in the CMOS Setup section. If the boot order is not changed, then the system will just reboot from the hard disk, ignoring the CD-ROM.

Now insert the installation disk into your CD drive and reboot. You should see a boot prompt.

Boot options¶

Before booting from LiveCD you will see the boot menu. Use the F1-F5 keys to navigate through the menu.

• F1 Help - Displays the help page.
• F2 Language - Available: English, French, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.
• F3 Keymap - Select your keyboard layout. If you have chosen the system language at the previous step, you can generally skip this item.
• F4 Timezone - Choose your local time zone from the list.
• F5 Video - Screen resolution. In most cases this can be skipped.
• Tab Edit options - Edit the kernel boot line. For experienced users only.

These boot parameters will be used later to install your new system.

Partitioning¶

After booting the computer you can use different programs for partitioning depending on the distribution you have chosen.
CDS, CLS : fdisk, cfdisk
CLD: KDE Partition Manager, fdisk, cfdisk
CLDX: Gnome Partition Editor, fdisk, cfdisk

You can also use auto-partitioning with the installer.
WARNING: In this case all data on your hard drive will be destroyed!

Installation¶

Since Calculate Linux 10.9, we use the cl-install utility for installation. A graphical front-end is provided for CLD, CLDG, CLDX and CLS versions: cl-console-gui. To run this program, click on the icon "Calculate Linux Install" on your desktop.

To install the system on the second partition of your hard disk with cl-install, run the following in the terminal with root privileges:

cl-install -d /dev/sda2

Here is the list of most commonly used parameters:

• --hostname HOSTNAME - set a short or a full hostname;
• -l - the system locale. The supported languages are en_US - American English, bg_BG - Bulgarian, de_DE - German, es_ES - Spanish, fr_FR - French, it_IT - Italian, pl_PL - Polish, pt_BR - Portuguese, ru_RU - Russian, and uk_UA - Ukrainian;
• --mbr DEVICE - disk with master boot record; if set to 'off', changes will be disabled.

During installation, the program will extract stage4 - that is, the image of your future system - and perform the initial configuration via templates.