I am trying to set up a number of diskless computers to run off a linux machine, not interested in using windows at this point.. My intent is to make use of old 486's and early pentiums that are laying around my school gathering dust.

I've read everything I could find on networkbooting and Etherboot, seems like this is a common proceedure...makes a lot of sense.

In working on this at home, I've got bootp, etherboot and TFTP installed on the server. I've got NFS working between two linux boxes. Both are uptodate machines with disks.

I'm using suse 9.1 on both machines.

I want to start off just by booting the would be DC using the floppy (later I'll worry about the eprom-nic deal.

The sites on the web all seem to tell me to make a boot floppy, I have only to concatenate the boot block with the etherboot binary containing the driver for my network card by

cat floppyload.bin 3c509.lzrom > /dev/fdo

Question
1) I cannot find the binary floppyload.bin anywhere. Its not on my server to be, I went to LTSP for find an image to download, but I'm lost as to what to download, then what to do with it

2)what is the 3c509.lzrom?

ny nic card is a asustec 3c920b integrated fast ethernet controller.

Can anyone help. Please be a specific as you reasonably can, I am not a linux guy, just a teacher, but I do see a huge potential here to get more computers in the hands of more kids at a very nominal cost, especially for the less wealthy schools.

Thanks,

Scott

Have you checked out The Linux Terminal Server Project?

It may answer a lot of your questions as well as provide a walkthrough. I tried to get it set up in the past, but was distracted. I remember it being a very good source of information though.

Thanks, Yes, I've been there. I will revisit it and go thru it more carefully. In the meantime, I'm open to more ideas.

Geez, I'm a blockhead. You even mentioned that you went to LTSP in your post. My apologies. I'll head to the blackboard and write "I will read posts more thoroughly" 100 times.

Feeling dejected and in general, more an annoyance than anything else, I did a quick search. The floppyload.bin file is part of the Etherboot package. I found a document referencing the Etherboot homepage.

The link in the page is slightly broken (it has httpd:// instead of http://), and you can find it here. The portion applicable is this:
So you will need to snag the Etherboot package, determine which rom image applies to your card, and then perform the command from within the etherboot directory as mentioned in the quote above.

Have you been to this Project's homepage before?
http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/w...php/ThDownload
browse down and try the universal network boot disk.

Thank you guys, I will work on your suggestions tonight.

Dark your obviously no blockhead....thank you for your efforts, will be interesting to see if I can get this done. I'm convinced Linux could be a huge thing for schools, especially making use of the old hardware. Kids often just wreck the windows machines, and the viruses!