On 24/01/07, Yedidyah Bar-David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
2007/1/24, Amos Shapira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > I've just realized that maybe the original subject was wrong and > therefore pointed repliers to the wrong direction. What I was after is to > actually be able to run something under Win98 which will start the boot > sequence of Linux over the network and end up with NFS-root. So far it looks > like LTSP and maybe loadlin can help me achieve that. > > On 24/01/07, Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ha :) This laptop is so old that it doesn't have an integrated network > card - the net card is a PCMCIA 10/100 addition I bought her around 2003. > IIRC etherboot does not support PCMCIA. It might (low chances) support USB.
Dully noted. Will try to continue down the LTSP path later tonight. AS I SAID BEFORE it might but it involves a reboot, strictly speaking.
> > Once inside a system there is no way to change to another system > > without > > > Bzzt. Wrong answer - Win98 is actually DOS, which uses "real mode"[1], > so things like loadlin (which was probably what I was looking for when > asking my first question) are possible. > No, that's not true. Win98 is not DOS. It does use protected mode, although in some obscure way - IIRC only to separate the OS and the processes, not to separate the processes themselves. In any case, that's not the point IMO. The point is caching. The reason you want a real clean reboot is in order to allow the OS to cleanly flush the caches (and do an equivalent of umount - not sure exactly what win98 does in this regard).
Care to comment to the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Me#Last_DOS_based_Windows "Windows Me is the last version of a DOS-based Windows OS." Windows Me is listed in Wikipedia as the successor to Win98 so... And as a DOS-based system, as far as I remember it didn't provide OS-level disk write caching. What I think might be the best for you, considering your PCMCIA card and the
fact you do not want a menu on boot: Write some set of batch files, that will do the following: When she chooses to start linux (probably some desktop shortcut to a batch file you'll write), the file will connect to the linux server (by tftp or some other way - maybe wget etc.), download a kernel and initrd, and will put them in some convenient place ( e.g. C:\linux), removing old versions first (to allow seamless "upgrades" controlled from the server), and will change the boot sequence (probably autoexec.bat or some file it will call or something) to do two things: first restore the "normal" boot sequence, then start linux (using loadlin). Note that during the running of autoexec.bat you are still in real mode, no caching etc., so it's safe to do. Then reboot (I mean, the first script will then reboot). I did not write this very clearly but I hope you understand.
Yes, I got you. I'm still not sure all this is required instead of just a simple loadlin but I take you as someone with more experience with that than me. Cheers, --Amos
