Package: win32-loader Severity: wishlist X=Debbugs-CC: Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg@gmail.com> First of all thank you for your wonderful win32-loader. We've modified it a bit so that it adds a "Boot from network" entry in the Windows boot loader, instead of loading a Linux kernel. To accomplish this we statically linked gpxe.lkrn [1] to win32-loader.exe, and we modified main.nsi to load this instead of vmlinuz. No initrd was necessary. Currently the resulting "ltsp-loader.exe" [2] is used in some thousand Greek school PCs to netboot thin and fat clients. But many others have asked for this functionality in the #ltsp irc channel and in the ltsp-discuss mailing list, so we think it'd be much better if the upstream win32-loader Makefile supported a "Boot from network with gPXE" target. Unfortunately gPXE is not yet in Debian due to (afaik) some unresolved licensing issues. However if the win32-loader Makefile supported a gPXE target, maybe one of the following would be possible: * The gPXE devs to compile win32-loader with the gPXE target, and to host the resulting win32-loader-gpxe.exe on their site themselves. * Or a sysadmin or user could do that for his own use. * Or win32-loader.exe could dynamically download gpxe.lkrn from the gPXE website. If you want we can send you the .diff for main.nsi that we currently have, but we aren't very skilled with NSIS scripting so if you decide to add that functionality upstream you'd probably want to properly reimplement this yourselves. :) In any case thanks again, Alkis Georgopoulos [1]: http://www.etherboot.org/ [2]: http://users.sch.gr/alkisg/tosteki/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2136.0;attach=1941 --
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