Jonathan Dieter wrote:
All this talk about grub reminds me of something I wanted to do a few
years ago and never quite succeeded, so maybe someone else will know how.
I'd like to have a locally installed system, but have one of the boot
choices be to network-boot into an LTSP thin-client. I don't want to
just PXE boot because I want the default after a timeout to be a local
OS. I thought some versions of grub used to be able to do the
equivalent of an etherboot internally, but that may be gone now. If I
have a stand-alone bootable floppy or CD that will network-boot the way
I want, is there a way to copy that to the hard drive and make a grub
menu choice that will load it?
This isn't quite the way that you're describing, but I've set all of the
computers in our school to boot from PXE, and the default option in the
pxelinux.cfg/default is to boot from the local hard drive. Whenever I
want to re-image the computers, I just change the default option and
send WOL to the computers.
I want to give the option to the computer user, not have to change it on
the dhcp server. A PXE-booted grub menu would be great if one of the
choices could be to boot locally and another could be to network boot as
a thin client. Even better if another non-default choice could be to
boot into a network install.
The other thing you might try would be to use Rom-o-matic to generate an
etherboot floppy image for your network card and write it to a small
(~1MB) partition on your hard drive. Then, in Grub do the whole
rootnoverify(hd0,x), chainloader +1 and see how that works. I haven't
actually tried this method, but it seems that it should work.
Going this route, I'd rather not have to dedicate a partition. Is there
any way to put it in /boot along with a linux boot setup?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
