Re: [Etherboot-users] pxe boot ?

[Cristian M. <cri...@on...>]

* Roy Wiseman <roy...@ya...> [25-09-05 11:08]:
 
> 
> [...]
> 
> About what I'm trying to achieve, I described it a bit
> in my first email, but basically, I have some Fujitsu
> Stylistic tablet PC's with no floppy drives and no
> cd-rom's. They have 4 GB hard drives and Pentium 233
> CPU's with 64MB. ok, I cannot boot from floppy or CD,
> but they do have PXE support on the NIC's. These
> little systems will run Debian or Win98 very nicely
> and for firewall/email/ftp servers there really is
> enough power to do that under Debian but I cannot boot
> them without using the PXE function on the network
> cards ! But *generically*, this is something I've
> wanted for ANY system for a long time, a way to always
> be able to boot an image across the network for
> diagnostics, Ghost, repartitioning etc.

Then you could try and install debian over the network, booting with PXE
and loading the installation from network, Fedora & RedHat also can be
installed this way.
 
> It seems that STEP 1 for anyone doing PXE network
> booting is to boot a system across a network, and to
> do that is almost imporssible without spending 10
> hours wading through very awkward documentation. As an
> example, I've got an honours degree in physics and
> over 15 years of working in large corporate networks
> (so I'm fairly used to looking at dry documentation),
> and in many hours of looking at this documentation I
> cannot get to STEP 1 ... it's like SYSLINUX and
> Etherboot are incredibly cool technology, but they are
> a bit crippled for the lack of someone saying "Here's
> the quick way : get a tftp/dhcp server <some examples
> of what's suitable>, here's a FreeDOS and a Linux boot
> image <download links>, here's some sample
> configuration scripts for these images, now put this
> here, and that there, turn on the tftp/dhcp server and
> you are DONE". 
[...]
 To understand more about how the etherboot/pxelinux works,
get a look at the LTSP wiki (wiki.ltsp.org) under 'Booting methods':
 http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/Etherboot
 http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/PXE


> 
> 
> Thanks !   (... and I'm sorry for the long emails !!)
> :o)
> 
> Roy.

 For simple DOS booting images you cand try http://tinyurl.com/9dxyv
for starters, it's a floppy image with FreeDos, you can boot it with
memdisk.


mitu

PS please replay below the message and not above it, it's much easier to
follow the discussion thread this way.