Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic - Re: PXE for fucking idiots

Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic

by Chairman Mao 01/14/2005, 10:14pm PST

Its used now as a replacement for the floppy-based network Gentoo install. It seems recently all Linux distributions have abandoned the idea of Linux being, I dunno, Unix-like enough to be (realtively) easily installed over a network. When they don't demand you purchase their distribution CD (fedora, suse) they demand you at least burn an ISO and install from that. Oh sure, most of them still have a floppy-based network install, but the documentation seems to have dried up. I have a machine that has a HD and a floppy drive. When I built it they weren't such cunts about this.

I'm realtively certain the machine's onboard NIC supports PXE, and at first glance it seemed really cool. Then the docs start talking about making directories (WHERE? on Linux drives you havn't prepped?) and seem to indicate that you need a Linux machine to install Gentoo that way.

Why am I bothering with Gentoo again? Because FreeBSD flatly refuses to install on this machine. Also, Gentoo has much broader filesystem support at install time as I remember. I'm sure I'm missing something fairly obvious here, though.