Hi All,
Since I’ve recently done a post on how to setup a PXE network boot server, I thought I would do a few on distributions that can be booted through PXE.
First up, is xPUD. I’ve used this before for diskless workstations.
It is a packaged distribution suitable for light computer use with Firefox built in and also a media player.
Further applications can be added via use of additional opt packges which can then extend the functionality of xPUD.
In this post, I will just be booting a vanilla xPUD image from the PXE server.
The alternative way of booting xPUD via PXE is to extract the contents of the ISO file and using NFS to boot from the files themselves, but this is more complicated as it involves the use of an NFS server and permissions to setup. This will be something that I will cover in a different post.
Step 1
We will need to get the xPud image file first.
wget http://download.xpud.org/xpud-0.9.2-image
This will download the xPud image to the hard drive of the PXE server.
Step 2
Next up, we will need to move the file to the tftpboot directory.
Once again, I have chosen to have a subdirectory for xPud to keep it nice and tidy.
mkdir /tftpboot/xpud
mv xpud-0.9.2-image /tftpboot/xpud
Step 3
After we’ve copied the files over, we now need to modify the default file to setup the extra menu option so we can boot xPud.
Once you’ve added this codeblock, you should now be able to boot xPud over the network.
label xpud
menu label xPud 0.9.2
kernel xpud/xpud-0.9.2-image
It might take a little while to boot as the server needs to transfer ~45 megabytes over the network, but once it’s up and running, it’s all run from ram and should be pretty snappy.
