Network boot Puppy (Solved using Puppy Unleashed)

Using applications, configuring, problems
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roman

Network boot Puppy (Solved using Puppy Unleashed)

#1 Post by roman »

Hello to everyone !

This is my first post on this forum.
I discovered puppy while playing around with network booting,
and since puppy in its base consists of only 2 or 3 files (vmlinuz, image.gz, (usr_cram.fs)) i treid to use these files as my network boot images.

describtion of my configuration:

server side:
1. dhcp server:
gives client an ip,gateway,dns, tftp-server-ip and the initial image to load from the tftp-server (in my case this is nbgrub)

2. tftp server:
hosts all needed files for the client to boot.
(in my case these are: nbgrub+grub.conf, vmlinuz (taken from puppy) and image.gz (also taken from puppy) )

client side:
1. etherboot rom image for my networkcard (at the moment loaded from floppy at boot)


Note: i dont use an NFS server to mount the rootfs remotely
(the whole rootfs is contained in image.gz (which the kernel will use as its initrd). therefore everything will be loaded into clients ram.

This configuration works fine.
The only problem is that i had to use an old version of puppy (i think 0.9.2), because in the newer versions usr_cram.fs is not included inside image.gz any more which is needed for my netboot setup.

So what i wanted to ask the forum is:
is it possible to get a new puppy version (perhaps including firefox)
which includes usr_cram.fs inside image.gz?
Or perhaps someone can instruct me on how this can be done manually?



thx,
Roman

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BarryK
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Joined: Mon 09 May 2005, 09:23
Location: Perth, Western Australia
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#2 Post by BarryK »

Yes, look on the main News page, do a search for "Murga"
-- John Murga has created what you want, not the latest version, second-latest.

roman

#3 Post by roman »

thank you for the answer BarryK.

meanwhile i discovered "puppy unleashed",
which does exactly what i need !

with it i created vmlinuz + image.gz (including usr_cram.fs)
i was able to boot them over the network right away (had to pass larger ramdisk_size option to kernel)

last but not least i would like to say that i am really impressed by puppy (especially by its simplicity).
i think i will spend some free time to discover the "internals" of puppy.
Perhaps someone has some hints, howtos, docs, ... (for creating packages, compiling costum kernel, ...) ?


thanks,
Roman

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#4 Post by Guest »

There's a real good page on compiling a puppy kernel.........No different than any other distro other than applying the ntfs & squashfs patch then it's all bussiness as usual.

the initrd can be reduced in size by compiling in the required NIC driver into the kernel, if you know what machines are booting and the required nic.

Also the kernel could be reduced in size by removing ide support and floppy support and in effect that would stop users from accessing local media.....alot could be done actually

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BarryK
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Posts: 9392
Joined: Mon 09 May 2005, 09:23
Location: Perth, Western Australia
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#5 Post by BarryK »

Yeah, and I'll be uploading the config file for the 2.4.29 kernel soon, and the ntfs and squashfs patches for the source.
-- 2.4.29 is used in the upcoming Pup 1.0.4.
-- I compiled it on Vector Linux 5.0STD beta, but it could be compiled on some other distro.

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