I can personally vouche for LTSP. LTSP has been around for over 3 years now. I tried it during the early years and I must say it has come along way. It's certainly more refined than any of the other diskless Linux projects out there today. Installation is a breeze compared to other similar projects. Although Etherboot is the default method for network booting, PXE is also supported. Simply download the pxestuff tarball and read the README file.
The default LTSP PXE kernel supports most, if not all, the NICs offers by the supported Linux distros including RH, Suse, Debian, and Mandrake. Auto hardware detection is used to detect your video if you wish to run X-Windows mode. You can run in text mode by changing the RUNLEVEL value for your client in the lts.conf file. LTSP is very customizable and extensible. Users and developers are encouraged to contribute to the project. Some members are using LTSP with RDESKTOP as launching pad to connect to Citrix or Windows 2000 Terminal sessions. You can download the source files and build your own LTS distribution. This is exactly what K12LTSP (http://www.k12ltsp.org) did. I don't think it would be a leap to merge UNATTENDED with LTSP to develop a robust, DOS-free deployment solution. However, I'm not a PERL or Linux shell scripting expert. -- --------- Original Message --------- DATE: 17 Jun 2003 11:26:28 -040 From: "Patrick J. LoPresti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: "Stephan Borg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,"Scott Card" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,[EMAIL PROTECTED] >"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 > Need a new email address that people can remember Check out the new EudoraMail at http://www.eudoramail.com
