Re: Linux distros

Bill Cunningham wrote:
I personally prefer to have all of the official packages burned on local
media. The install CD/DVD allow you to recover from boot failures and such. There are sites which host extra packages for Slackware, just search "slackware packages", linuxpackages.net is pretty good.

The bittorent downloads are the preferred way of getting the ISOs.

http://www.slackware.com/getslack/

I notice that slackware has PXE boot support. My computer is new enough to support that. I just don't know what files to download and where to put them to use PXE. I've read the readmes too. Can you use PXE boot to download packages via windows? Or must it be done through linux?

Bill


PXE boot's the computer from a server that is configured to serve up a boot system to the PXE client. It wouldn't matter if you have windows installed on that target machine or not. In the case of PXE boot to install Slackware on a target machine you just need to have the server set up properly to kick-start the installation process. Setting up a PXE server is relatively hard. I have a server setup to serve to PXE clients and it works wonders. In my case I configured it to serve diskless Linux workstations and compute nodes.

It's hardly worthwhile to setup a PXE server to install one workstation. If I had 100 to configure it would be sweet. BTW, just in case you don't know the PXE server has to be on the local lan.

Here's a link to a page talking about setting up a Slackware PXE installation server.

http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:pxe

I find it interesting that large organizations haven't wised up to the management advantages of diskless workstations booting a secure OS like Linux. You can create one image on a server and through the magic of symbolic links serve the same OS image to hundreds of client machines.

Regards
.

Relevant Pages

  • Newbie Q about booting
    ... I'm sticking with Slackware 10 because it seems to require that I ... Things keep saying "Boot from a DOS floppy", ... I'm trying to do what I've done in the past, namely install W2k then ... I find that I don't understand what a boot partition actually is. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: installing Ubuntu via PXE using tftpd32
    ... If possible, boot from CD-ROM or DVD, and install from there! ... turned off the windows firewall and the routers own DHCP server. ... Are you wanting to do a PXE install over a wireless LAN? ...
    (comp.os.linux.setup)
  • Re: Winnt.exe Unattended Setup for 64-bit Server 2003.
    ... With regards to you latest post, can you give me details on what Linux PXE ... figure out a way to PXE boot with ISO images using this system. ... > We are using a Linux PXE system, from which we are booting WinPE ... >>The WinPE install is approximately 213MB, and with the OS source files I'm ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.setup)
  • Re: Winnt.exe Unattended Setup for 64-bit Server 2003.
    ... >With regards to you latest post, can you give me details on what Linux PXE ... >figure out a way to PXE boot with ISO images using this system. ... >> We are using a Linux PXE system, from which we are booting WinPE ... >>>The WinPE install is approximately 213MB, and with the OS source files I'm ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.setup)
  • Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x
    ... > Brooks Davis wrote: ... > boot FreeBSD on a couple of machines that did not support a boot ROM and ... The hard part about using PXE to install a box is ...
    (freebsd-hackers)