I am in the process of closing a deal of hundreds of barebone systems with onboard audio, video and lan. Unfortunately, since it's a barebone, space inside is very cramped, and it is impractical to connect a cd rom to each unit, and wait for it to boot the livecd, and check whether memory, video and lan card are functioning well. I was thinking whether there is a way to boot from a sort of server on the network with livecd images. This way, I don't have to wait for a long period to get it up to graphical interface. Floppy drive to boot into network is also not an option. It doesn't have any built-in floppy.

I think this is what they call terminal server, but I'm not familiar with how to set it up step by step. Any guides around?

Thanks.

well there's no need to use a livecd as such, as whether you do or not, this is going to be an isolated issue from the act of booting to something at all. If you do do want to use a floppy disk, you will need to hope and prey that these machines support PXE booting. If so then they simply brodcast to the network a request for a pxe boot image, it then recieves one from the server and starts booting according to what the server says.

as i said, there is no need to use a live cd at all, (your reference to boot times really doesn't make sense to me)... and if you did, you'd certainly NOT have it on a physical CD, there's absolutely no benefit in that whatsoever. Instead set up a real terminal server and go from there.

http://ltsp.org
http://etherboot.org
http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

Ok, I think the term I'm looking for is terminal server. Will take at links you provided. Thanks.