DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: Boot dsl over network?

The current linuxrc in the initrd (minirt24.gz) of DSL searches the cdrom, any hard drive partitions it comes across and any usb storage devices it come across for a /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX file (i.e. the root filesystem). Once it is found the drive containing this file is mounted to /cdrom. Then the /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX image is mounted to /KNOPPIX, symlinks to this filesystem are setup and the standard init process is started.

I imagine that in order to get PXE boot working you'll need to modify the linuxrc thats in the initrd to mount the nfs share as /cdrom. Once this is done the remainder of the boot process should work unchanged. You'll need the network to be up before it is mounted so I imagine this would require the modules for your network card + ifconfig to be part of the initrd. But adding ifconfig to the initrd may be difficult since there would be various dependencies which would also need to be added. A static compile may help here.

Seeing as DSL's boot process is basically the same as knoppix's it would be a good idea to look around for info on getting knoppix to boot over a network - much of it will apply to DSL.

I wonder if the initrd for knoppix on this page could be modified to work with DSL?

what about installing the Debian-edu-config metapackage developed by Skolelinux
I am able to boot skolelinux via pxe , maybe they can be apt-get from the debian repositories that will make a verry fast server a la LTSP.

Bingo!

friedgold's question.
"I wonder if the initrd for knoppix ... could be modified to work with DSL?"
Answer - YES!

I haven't cleaned it up completely but I wanted to get the post out to the list.

Step 0 Set up your DHCP server and TFTP server

Step 1. Setup your NFS server to offer the DSL KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
my exported fs is /var/dsl
with the dsl KNOPPIX filesystem it looks like /var/dsl/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX

Step 2. Download the knoppix tar for pxe
knoppix.pxe

Step 3. Untar it and place the contents of its knoppix directory into your TFTP server
mine looks like:
/var/tftpboot/ <files from the tar>

Step 4. Modify the
<yourTftpbooDir>/pxelinux.cfg/default
file to change the nfsdir variables.
I changed mine to:
nfsdir=192.168.1.8:/var/dsl

Boot!
thanks guys,

John Conlon

surely just use the network boot floppy and serve it using tftp instead of a floppy drive?

original here.