Andrew McNabb wrote: > Topher has recruited me to give the next UUG meeting. There are a bunch > of related ideas that I'd be happy to talk about, so I would like to > have some feedback from the list about what would be the most > interesting and useful. > > CDs and DVDs are so 1990s. Who in their right mind would spin a thin > piece of plastic at 26000 RPM? Not only are optical disks loud, slow, > and inefficient, but damaged disks can even explode (see Mythbusters > episode 2 for more details). The only time most Linux users use an > optical disk is when installing their system or importing a DVD, but > many computers (like netbooks) don't even have optical drives. > > Anyway, there's a lot more to booting and installation than burning a > CD. Here are a couple of topics that we could cover: > > - making a bootable USB flash drive > - using a USB flash drive as a rescue disk (I always have one in my > wallet) > - loading a specific kernel or install image onto a thumb drive > - installing by booting from the network (PXE Boot) > - setting up a diskless Linux client to boot from the network > - using a Kickstart for automated installation with custom scripts > - installing a virtual machine with PXE > > Is there anything in this list that you would love to learn about? Do > any of these topics seem particularly boring? Is there anything you > would like to add to the list? There are a ton of different directions > I could go with this, and I want to make sure that I focus on what you > find interesting. > >
I've often thought that someone should bring a machine with a few distros' locally mirrored to the installfest, set up DHCP/PXE, etc., and put the installfest network behind that. That way anyone who could pxeboot wouldn't need any media at all. And for those old BIOS's, we could just have a few USB keys or CDs with a basic gpxe image to boot from. Most BIOS can boot from pxe now, though, right? Of course, I'm not sure how much load it'd put on the hard drives. I imagine that for just a handful at a time, it wouldn't be that bad. Just a guess, though. Lloyd -- Lloyd Brown Systems Administrator Fulton Supercomputing Lab Brigham Young University http://marylou.byu.edu -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
