On Sat, 6 May 2006 18:55:25 +0200 RalfGesellensetter wrote: > Am Mittwoch 03 Mai 2006 11:01 schrieb nigel barker: > > I have discovered that old laptops with pcmcia NICs are not able to > > boot from a freshly installed skolelinux terminal server. They are > > using the old ltsp3 "wireless" boot floppy. > > Hi Nigel, hello list, > > it is the first time that I hear something that sound like a positve > answer to the question: Can I boot thin clients over wireless LAN? I believe it actually (unfortunately) somewhat the opposite: An earlier solution to booting from _wired_ NICs on laptops does not work with current LTSP. > Could anybody please elaborate on this issue? Is there a PXE version > for WLAN? Or some disk image project cpmparable to rom-o-matic? The short answer is "no" as far as I am aware. But since you asked for elaboration... :-) PXE is popular in proprietary systems like commercial BIOSes. Similar protocols are RPL (old and quite very rare) and netboot (popular in free systems and used in the etherboot project including rom-o-matic). All three are "boot protocols", providing access to a bootloader through the network. The LTSP pcmcia floppy works around this by putting together a plain old floppy bootloader, a linux kernel, some pcmcia NIC drivers, the pcmcia helper daemon, and some LTSP-specific boot scripts. To get something similar (or wireless) working with current LTSP, anup-to-date 2.6 kernel and related drivers and scripts need to be put together. I suspect the biggest challenge will be space: kernel + initrd + helper tools and scripts need to be crammed together on a floppy. Or perhaps use a CD instead? Then perhaps work with the Debian Live sub project to have it offer to boot off the network instead of from the CD. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ - Enden er n_r: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
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