Wonderful ideas! Many people would like .PET that would allow them to just put a non-Puppy ISO in a directory, enable it to be served, and violla!gcmartin wrote:Thanks @Aitch. Those are good approaches you present. I am going to open a new thread. It should helps us with 2 things which is what we working to solve.Hope this helps
- An approach to getting a non-Puppy ISO/IMA to boot a PC over PXE. And,
- to investigate what can be done to embrace a technology (a PET) in Puppy to allow this to occur.
Here's the thread for discussion of Non-Puppy NETBOOTing
For the record, I was able to do flash the BIOS over PXE with netboot-server, using FreeDOS (a non-Puppy image), so apparently serving a non-Puppy image with netboot-server is trivial. (I also created an ISO of the floppy files and serving that with PXE. While the PXE part worked, the result of doing so was nothing to write home about, but the netbooting part worked fine!)
But for those who want a script to configure things for them, "mknetboot.sh" configures tftp to serve up a Puppy Linux image using a Linux kernel, while serving up a DOS image requires the memdisk" kernel (although to configure this would be very trivial). That begs the question, can you serve Linux with memdisk? I will try to use memdisk to serve a Puppy ISO and see if a Linux kernel is actually required. (Hey, you never know!)
Still, I don't see why "mknetboot.sh" couldn't be configured to optionally create a symlink to "fdboot.img" and configure "pxelinux.cfg/default" accordingly, or even give the user the option of adding 1 or more files to "fdboot.img" (such as those for BIOS update). It seems to me the complicated part would be offering more than one choice to a client at the same time (because the current Multi-boot Pup approach packs all the choices into one big ISO).
However, after I give explanations/solutions for some of the issues I encountered trying to update my BIOS and using FreeDOS and bootable floppy images over PXE, I will test some more methods with FreeDOS (and BIOS, too), especially ways that include menu choices, as well as trying that Multi-Puppy boot. Together they might yield some useful hints!