Network-booting?

[Evangelion]

I'm interested in the Linux terminal-Server project (www.ltsp.org). And my question is: How could I handle the net-booting? To my knowledge, I have three choices:

1. Booting via boot-floppy

2. Booting via NIC that has boot-ROM

3. Making my own boot-ROM

What if none of those are a viable choice? For example, look at the Light-860A-IR53F in here (click the pic for bigger picture). There's no way to attach a floppy-drive, it has a built-in NIC, so installing NIC with special boot-ROM is not possible. So how would I make something like that work with LTSP? It's obviously ideal for a X-terminal, the problem is to make it boot properly.

Any ideas?
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[mgirard]

Well. It has a hard drive right? What I would do is to create a small bootable linux partition on the drive and install the grub (or lilo) bootloader. This can be configured to netboot the machine. Of course taking it a step further I would create a second partition on the harddrive of type linux swap. This could be used for local swapping rather than having an NFS mount for swapspace. Your root filesystem (/) and the users homes (/home) will both be nfs mounted in LTSP style.

That should work, but you are going to have to spend some time setting it all up.

Cheers,
-Matt

[Evangelion]

The machine does have one 2.5" device-bay, so you could fit a laptop HD there. But there are few problems with that:

1. It drives up the cost

2. Even the smallest HD's would be overkill for this kind of application.

The idea is to make a X-terminal with no moving parts, and that includes the HD. The HD could be used as as swap-space, but how about creating a ramdrive from the RAM, and using that as swap? Since X-terminal doesn't need that much RAM, you would have plenty of free RAM that isn't going to be used.
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