boot

[cast-fish]

sorry i may have saked this before


does tinycore offer a kind of "network boot up option"....whereby you switch on your laptop
and your laptop looks to it's internet connection to drag in and load an operating system PXE?

it would be nice to see this if it exists....and even use it

V.

[bmarkus]

Chapter 27 in Core book?

http://tinycorelinux.net/corebook.pdf

[cast-fish]

ok thank a lot.

v

[cast-fish]

ahh

going to read that stuff , in conjunction with what my quetion was really meant to say.


can tcl network boot from some distant serving service. In other words, do your servers
host a default image for the world to get hold of over pxe at any time?

V

[gerald_clark]

No.  You need to setup a PXE boot system.  The wiki has more information than the book.
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:netbooting

[cast-fish]

Helllo Gerald

after some looking around on the internet i found a service that can supply a disk-less internet boot up of Tinycore.  (and many other o's's also)

www.netboot.me/

you simply need a working computer in the very outset to set the DCHP settings of your router to look down at that website.  They give you the two settings
which are needed.  Then your router knows where to look for tinycore.

Then you power on your laptop which may be completely diskless and in the bios choose PXE boot.

The machine goes off and drags in Tinycore off the internet and boots it up in Ram.   It all works flawlessly as i tried it all here.

The advantage is that your router only needs initially setting up once.....

later on , you may indeed be diskless or in need of an operating sytem but not have any means to Burn the OS to disk for booting.  (your may not have any media around, or no hard drive)

So then you can always use a raw netboot-up of an operating system.

They host tinycore 2.2 and about 10 other Linux operating systems as live boots.

its very simple to organize for users.  (even i did it).    The laptop will boot to a menu of OS's   (you must "press any key) and then choose "boot right away" and give it the code for tinycore
which is "2007" from the literature.

Another useful thing is the offer boot image files for floppy USB hard disc or ROM CHIP. So you can
just keep a floppy boot disk for netbooting tinycore. You can use that on any computer really.

(there was another man here on the forum who managed to get TCL working in Amazon EC2 virtual servers. But it looked a little tricky and i didn't really see him mention a simple "image file" for you to link your amazon server to so)  he created an amazon AMI  for tinycore ( and loaded it in the S2 amazon server farms)



Thanks

Vince.

[gerald_clark]

As I said, you need to setup a PXE boot system.
This consists of a dhcp server and a tftp server.
The dhcp server, you must supply ( Either your router if configurable ) or a dhcp server on your network.
The instructions you pointed to warn that if you are behind a NAT router ( Most people are ) you also need to setup a tftp server.
If you use dnsmasq for dhcp, good news. It can also do tftp.

So my answer is no, you probably  cannot directly boot remotely over the internet.
You will need to configure at least a dhcp server, and probably a tftp server.
This local bootstrap will allow you to  net boof the gpxe loader.

The important thing to remember is that once you have setup a tftp server, you might as well  serve the vmlinuz and core.gz files too.
Once you have done this you can experiment with networked persistent storage as well.

[cast-fish]

right

what it did here worked fine.  Just downloaded a copy of the "boot image" they have for floppy.
That at least worked fine and dragged in tinycore.

The pxe boot is saying that your router can be the server.(it it's dnsmasq it can do both the servers  then it's right isn't it.   A complete discless network boot.

[gerald_clark]

I have been PXE booting Core on diskless machines for several years now.
Have fun.