[plug] Helpers wanted - Netbooting Installations

[Ian Kent]

On Wed, 26 May 2004, Bernard Blackham wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> I'm after people who have had some experience in getting their
> favourite (or least favourite :) distribution to install through
> netbooting. Debian I can do; the others are Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake
> and Gentoo. If you've done it before and willing to help do it
> again, could you please let me know.

You don't mean booting from LAN card PROM do you?

> 
> As part of the Installfest preparations, I've been looking at
> setting up a netboot installation setup where:
> 
>  1. you drop a floppy/CD-ROM into a machine

Done this for RH 7.1 and 7.3.

Do you want a canned 15-20 minute LAN based install as well. If this will 
mean decisions regarding disk partitions, net config etc. for the 
customisation scripting.

>  2. It boots to a GRUB menu that asks you to select your network
>     card/driver (one of GRUB's drivers)

Mmm ... have to think about it.

>  3. It loads that driver and DHCPs on the network for an IP address,
>     a TFTP server, and another menu to display.
>  4. The menu lists the various distributions available. The user
>     selects one.

OK I've missed your point. I've just done this with RH kickstart. Perhaps 
I can contribute to this as well.

>  5. The installation netboots and whatever happens from therein is
>     distribution specific.
> 

Ian