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LAN PXE Boot

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langerak
langerak Posts: 15
in Ubuntu

Heya all!

As you all know it's possible to install Ubuntu and all sorts of flavors via LAN boot using PXE. But is it possible to use it for normal usage. I mean, using it like you would boot from your harddrive into your ubuntu desktop, but now using PXE? I only find installation howto's but not using it for normal usage :)

Thanks in advance!

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  • ludovic.ferre
    ludovic.ferre Posts: 21
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    I think this is the sole purpose of the LTSP project [1]. It allows you to boot a kernel via PXE and connect to a remote desktop (the server) in a Thin client manner (whatever the hardware configuration you are running.

    Now I understand that what you may want is to run a full Linux distro (like Ubuntu) and albeit this is doable I wouldn't advise anyone to do this.

    I work in computer management and I am a strong advocate to use Linux as a pre-boot environment as it can be loaded in a very short time compared to WinPE.

    Would you really want to download 600MB over the net to boot up a Linux system?

    At this rate I would rather use a USB stick boot option.

    [1] www.ltsp.org
  • atreyu
    atreyu Posts: 216
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    langerak wrote:
    Heya all!

    As you all know it's possible to install Ubuntu and all sorts of flavors via LAN boot using PXE. But is it possible to use it for normal usage. I mean, using it like you would boot from your harddrive into your ubuntu desktop, but now using PXE? I only find installation howto's but not using it for normal usage :)

    Thanks in advance!
    Do you mean use a root filesystem that is hosted via NFS? If so, check out this article. It is not exactly what you want to do, but could get you going in the right direction. Otherwise, I agree with Ludovic. You want a thin client setup.
  • langerak
    langerak Posts: 15
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    That is right, i want to use the Thin Client idea and already got it almost running.

    The installation went smoothly, but now's the finetuning :D.

    What i've done is creating a small boot file around 8 Megs, and the actual linux image. It's not that big, only contains the base system and the X server, and the rest is handled by the server.

    It was by no means my idea to pump over 600 Megs of data :D. I'm not that enthousiastic :D.

    As stated by the last post, i use NFS to mount the volumes over the network and works like a charm!

    So far, thanks for the link and the support, appreciate it!

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