[gPXE] Use etherboot with very old laptop

[Oliver Rath]

Hi Pierre,

Pentium MMX is really old :-)

First, for Linux thin clients you dont need gpxe, the standard pxe of
your network card should be sufficient. If your nic not pxe-enabled, it
is a better way to boot linux-kernel from local disk and mount (i.e.
NFS-root) via network after this.

Maybe it is a good idea to boot partedmagic (www.partedmagic.com) via
pxe (as described there) for a proof of concept.

It is important to take the i486 compatible image, because Pentium MMX
doesnt support i686 images (for this you need at least Pentium Pro, the
successor of Pentium MMX).

If you like to be more sophisticated (i.e. using pxe menus, booting via
iscsi or http), take a look at www.ipxe.org, which is a great fork of
the ( a bit sleeping) gpxe-project. There you can take the undionly.kpxe
for chainloading your nic-pxe.

On the other side you can take pxelinux from syslinux-project (the new
4.10 release is quite powerfull) for create powerfull bootmenus.

The rom-o-matic images are only sensefull for creating binaries, which
can be burned into the boot rom of your nic.

HTH
Oliver

Am 06.03.2012 11:20, schrieb Pierre AUSSAGUEL:
> Hi all,
>
> I am trying to setup my old laptop (DELL Inspiron 3000 M166ST :
> http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/SYSTEMS/ptwist/specs.htm ) to
> use etherboot (It will be a thin client).
>
> The floppy drive and the CD-Rom drive are broken
> The USB port does not allow to boot
>
> I can access to the hard drive disk with a usb_to_ide adapter and
> mount it on my main computer (Gentoo linux)
>
> I have a 3 Com PC-CARD 3CXFE574BT ethernet adapter that works well
> under Linux
>
> I have tried to write some images generated by ROM-o-matic.net (.dsk
> .sdsk .iso .liso .usb ) using cat image > hdd but none seems to boot
>
> How can  do ?
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