"Teresa Jeremy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I have played around with diskless Linux, the Linux Terminal Server > Project (www.ltsp.org) and RH Kickstart.
LTSP looks promising; thank you for the pointer. > I wish that I knew enough about the linuxrc - the Linux equivalent > the autoexec.bat to script Windows based OS deployment. I have actually created a diskless Linux system from scratch. As I recall, the kernel runs /linuxrc if it exists, otherwise it just fires up /sbin/init. The /linuxrc script is primarily used by ramdisks. The linuxrc script typically locates, mounts, or creates the root file system, then invokes pivot_root to mount it on /, then fires off the next stage in whatever they are doing. All of this is the "easy" part :-). The hard part is finding an extensible, well-maintained diskless Linux distro with a rich set of drivers. I do not have the luxury of just supporting the hardware which I personally happen to have. This is the big advantage of the DOS boot disk combined with PXE booting: No drivers. > DOS is far too limited to fully automate a Windows OS deployment. > For instance, it would be nice to partition the drive then proceed > to formatting it without having to reboot. Linux does this quite > well. Absolutely. That is the Plan. > I'm presently looking at Windows PE as alternative to DOS; however, > using Linux to script a Windows OS installation would be awesome. Windows PE is certainly the most "Microsofty" approach. And it has the advantage of creating and writing NTFS partitions directly. But WinPE also costs money, which is somewhat contrary to the spirit of this project. --- Wolfgang Borst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > if the script is permitted to install, it will do the following things: > > - partition the hardisk [parted > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/parted.html] > - creating fat32 fileystems [parted] Parted is awesome. And the maintainer (Andrew Clausen) is very smart and very responsive. > - make the machine bootable (using w98/command.com)[ms-sys > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/ms-sys.html] Aren't there licensing issues with w98/command.com? I would really, really like to use FreeDOS instead. Too bad winnt.exe doesn't like it. (By the way, would anybody like to volunteer to help me fix this? Requirements are that you know how to compile things, that you know or can learn how to use CVS, and that you are willing to go through a tedious cycle searching for the FreeDOS kernel patch which broke things.) > - copy the files > - customize unattend.txt > > after that the machine is rebootet, starts the w98/command.com and > starts the windows xp setup. I am planning to run winnt.exe under dosemu instead, to avoid the extra file copy and to avoid ever actually booting into DOS. Other than that, however, my approach will be similar. > - mysqld stores informations about the clients (mac-address, is the > machine to be installed ..), about the software(which installscript is > used for software xyz, which software is part of the group 'base > installation' ). I hope to make the system extensible enough to permit this, but I doubt I will include it by default. We want people to be able to start using the system as quickly as possible. > the kernel for the clients is fetched via tftp then the > root-fileystem is mounted via nfs. I plan to allow either SMB or NFS (or HTTP?), defaulting to SMB. Windows users do not want to set up an NFS server. > maybe i'm allowed to release this project in the near future. Thank you for sending the master script. Italian PowerPoint slides, German Perl scripts, Australian co-developers... The Internet sure is cool. - Pat ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: INetU Attention Web Developers & Consultants: Become An INetU Hosting Partner. Refer Dedicated Servers. We Manage Them. You Get 10% Monthly Commission! INetU Dedicated Managed Hosting http://www.inetu.net/partner/index.php _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
