The Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE) protocol is becoming the defacto
standard for network booting today.
Most, if not all, corporate desktops purchased today are Wired for
Management (WfM) compliant. This normally means that the computer is
equipped with a BIOS-integrated PXE boot agent. However, the PXE boot
agent may also be onboard the network adapter.
Having WfM-compliant PCs makes it easy for network administrators to
implement LTS, since the client PCs now have all the components required for
network booting. This also removes rom-o-matic and etherboot mknbi
from the LTS picture. Although a PXE daemon is available for the Linux, a
PXE daemon is normally only mandatory if
the LTS boot server and the DHCP server are running on
separate computers. In fact, you can configure the
LTS/DHCP server to service PXE clients without installing or running
the PXE daemon.
PXELinux provides the PXE bootstrap that is required for network
booting. You can find instruction on PXELinux on the LTSP website.
However, if you wish to save yourself the trouble of installing and
configuring PXELinux and the required TFTP daemon, I strongly recommend that you
download K12LTSP Red Hat distro
which comes with PXELinux and LTS components prepackaged.
I should point out one caveat with K12LTSP: In my experience, the
X-Windows login screen did not appear when I tried to boot my first
client. To fix this problem, I had to download the LTSP core v2.08 and
Xserver files and install them over top the existing K12LTSP files and reboot
the server.
