Recently I've re-visited trying to use that old Sony as a digital picture frame by booting over Etherboot but have been unsuccessful in trying to create a kernel that would properly boot. I've got as far as creating the etherboot.nbi payload which is delivered via TFTP which is essentially a syslinux image.

As I was wasting too much time on this stupid picture frame, I fell back to using Knoppix 4.02, the last version AFAIK to ship with etherboot support. Versions after this gave up on etherboot and are only PXE boot.

Apparently you can emulate PXE boot using a disk or CD using gPXE (the same guys who did etherboot) but for some reason it doesn't work on my old PII 64MB 333 Mhz vaio.

So I'm stuck with etherboot for now.

Bud

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 1:17 PM, Anuradha Ratnaweera <anuradha@taprobane.org> wrote:

[CCing Srimal, who worked with me in the following project at the Uni,
in case he is too busy to read the linux list after going forth and
multiplying. ;-)]

Nice article, had never heard of pxe-linux before.

Couldn't resist writing down some old memories on this topic.

The method we used long time ago, in 2001 if I remember right, was to
do a two step boot using DHCP only. I don't think pxelinux existed
back then, and a linux kernel was too big for PXE to boot.

So we used Etherboot to boot Linux, but instead of burning Etherboot
into the (E)EPROM of the network card, we used DHCP to boot into
Etherboot as well.

1. The computer boots with PXE, makes a DHCP request, the DHCP server
answers by sending Etherboot boot parameters (it does this by
identifying that the request coming from PXE).

2. Etherboot boots, makes a DHCP request, and the DHCP server answers
by sending the linux kernel boot parameters.

So the trick was the then "new" version of DHCPD which could give
different boot parameters to different kind of requests (one for PXE,
and another for Etherboot).

This way we converted the complete Computer Center lab at Peradeniya
Engineering Faculty to a "supercomputer" in the night, without
touching the ancient software installed in their hard disks. ;-) And
the "server" was an unused PC with 32MB of RAM and 64MB of disk space!

Anuradha

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Buddhika Siddhisena
<buddhika.siddhisena@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> I've spent the election time messing around PXE booting for an article on
> digit.lk. The steps involve booting your currently running desktop system on
> another machine using PXE.
> Check it out at :
> http://www.digit.lk/10_feb_os1
>
> --
> Bud
>
> Geek with an Attitude
> Blog: http://geekaholic.org
> http://sinhalenfoss.org
>

> _______________________________________________
> linux-raw mailing list
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> https://secure.lug.lk/mailman/listinfo/linux-raw
>

--
Bud

Geek with an Attitude
Blog: http://geekaholic.org
http://sinhalenfoss.org