Jim, To defuse the "Etherboot-is-better-than-PXE-oh-no-it-isn't-oh-yes-it-is" thing, it would certainly make sense to have notes in the same place on all methods (yes, even bpbatch) available and to have an introductory note for people asking "I have PXE, what do I do?"
If one has Etherboot already, it's least impact to set up Etherboot via PXE; if you need to network boot via floppy or HDD, then go with Etherboot. If one has syslinux already, or will only be booting from a single NIC in each machine (guaranteed to have PXE) pxelinux is easier out of the box. If you have no strong opinions, it doesn't really matter, and changing is not too hard. I'm a fan of Etherboot for the same reason I'm a fan of Linux: it is open source doing what people need. The commercial firmware vendors aren't interested (their customers are system providers who want a simple way for their staff to construct systems - certainly *not* end-users). Etherboot is one of the family of open source projects (e.g. LinuxBIOS, Bochs, ADLO, nomadbios) which are allowing us to do interesting things at boot time. Etherboot is developing fast, so the situation will change quite soon: a previous poster suggested that PXE might displace Etherboot. Er, no. :) For one thing they aren't directly comparable, but it also seems quite likely that Etherboot can provide PXE services AND use an existing PXE stack AND doing its own thing. Etherboot needs a little more time before this becomes a simple option for things like LTSP, but expect this to happen soon. Also, expect more interest from the more enlightened *hardware* vendors (as opposed to firmware vendors) - SiS deserves an honourable mention here for its support of LinuxBIOS. In a low-margin business, the hardware vendors have little choice but to pay a "tax" to the firmware vendors on every motherboard. The prospect of paying less for better code must be tempting. NB - despite the acronym, PXES appears to be quite capable of using Etherboot. Once Linux has taken over, PXES, LTSP and any other Linux based project are completely independent of the boot mechanism. No OS can use PXE anyway (the 'P' in PXE stands for "Pre-Boot"). ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
