How to netboot PuppyLinux?

[NickBiker]

We had discussed your using a USB flash drive for the client to save to (work space).
I assume your not smbmounting Samba shares to use as the client's save area.
If you aren't using a local drive (HD, USB, etc.) then there's no permanent SAVE.
Anotherwords... to save a file (any file), it's saved to the ramdisk, upon rebooting it's gone.

My LAN puppies require no permanent storage at all and no access to the network (at the moment), once booted. All fits fine in RAM. I have tested and run them!

Q; What does your special app. do? ....... AND, how big is it?

It is a graphics display application. xmntimggz will not work as the mounted filesystem is too small. I need 20Mb+.

However, if I try to add a file of less than 1K using your xmodimagegz, it will not boot and reports the error posted earlier. Oddly, as posted here, I am sure I had your latest version working, but now when I try it (and I have re-downloaded it), it does not work at all.

Also if you want your app. to run automatically at bootup, tell me & I'll explain.

Thanks! You already posted me help on how to do this, and I have added the required exec into the startup script. Thanks for that.

All we need now is to get xmodimagegz to work!!

Thanks!!

[sunburnt]

Nick; Looking closer at your error I noticed it's carping about the ramdisk, not image.gz

The image.gz file is Gunzipped (decompressed) into the ramdisk.
So the size of the ramdisk is the size of the image file inside of image.gz plus extra.
Free space in the image file compresses very well, but the ramdisk is uncompressed.
You can't see the free space in the ramdisk because during boot it's replaced by tmpfs.

Needless to say the ramdisk MUST be larger than the image file going into it.
It sounds like the image file is okay, the ramdisk definitely has to be larger for 20MB extra!
Also, is 20MB a compressed size (file ends in .gz or bz, bz2) or the size of the app's. files?
If 20MB is compressed, size then the space needed in ramdisk for the image file is 50-70MB.
An image file I have, there was 47MB used & 2MB of free space, 50MB total size.

### To fix the ramdisk size problem...
In ROX right click on the file: "/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default" & [Open As Text].
You'll see the part: "ramdisk_size=(size)".
It needs to be the size of the image file (not image.gz) + extra (1 or 2MB).
Below is 2 ways to get at the image file inside image.gz.

To work with image.gz manually, make a copy of it, right click on it in ROX & [Copy].
Then right click in the ROX window & [Xterm Here].
In Xterm type: "gunzip image.gz" & it'll be replaced with the file "image".
In ROX right click on the image file & [Disk Usage] to see it's size.
Add 2MB to the size & replace the size value in the line: "ramdisk_size=(size)".
To gzip it back up, type: "gzip -9 image" (-9 is the highest compression level).
Try this & see how it works, let me know of your success or other errors.


If you want to mount the image file, type: "mount -t ext2 -o loop image /mntdata".
The contense of the image file can now be accessed at: /mnt/data
When done type: "umount /mnt/data", NOTE... it's "u mount" NOT "un mount"!

I can't remember if you have my file mount utility, it mounts:
image.gz, image, initrd.gz (Puppy2), ISO, & Squash files.
I'm posting it for you, I use it from a desktop icon frequently.
It pops up ROX with the mounted file's contense & a message dialog.
When done working with the image file, just click [okay] & it's unmounted.


NOTE; If the clients are keosks or something like that this is a good setup.
Especially if the server is shut off after the clients boot.
BUT, if the clients are normal desktop PCs you may want to server mount.
It takes a long time to TFTP a large image file to a client over the LAN.
Only vmlinuz (kernel) & image.gz (root file system) need to be sent TFTP.
The usr_cram.fs file can be server mounted & there's no TFTP delay.
The same's true for any other files like SAVE (most setups need to save something).