[K12OSN] Interesting conversation....concepts vs. OS

[Sudev Barar]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 07:36, Debbie Schiel wrote:
> Our mini-lab of PIIIs is setup so that the default boot is a network 
> boot to the K12ltsp server. Students can however press 'Esc' and then 
> boot to windows on the hard drive. Fine for PCs that can do a network 
> boot like that but what about older PCs? We don't have a windows 
> terminal server to connect to via rdesktop, if we did I'd convert the 
> older PCs to thin clients and that would be that.
> 
> I've converted older PCs to thin clients by copying a rom-o-matic floppy 
> to the entire hard drive using method described here: 
> http://www.k12ltsp.org/phpwiki/index.php/Technical%3ABooting%3AClient%3ALiLo
> 
> So I was wondering if I could modify the method above. A rom-o-matic 
> floppy boot on a PC starts off with a query like 'Boot from Network or 
> Quit?'.
> 
> Now I don't know if this can be done because I don't know much about how 
> partitioning hard drives works, but this is what I would like to do:
> I'd like to copy the rom-o-matic floppy to a *portion* of the hard drive 
>    which loads first; it asks me the question 'Network or Quit?' and 
> then if I say Quit, it loads up windows on the other portion of the hard 
> drive.

Joining the thread late so pardon if this is already gone over.

rom-o-matic allows you to make image for multiple boot choices. If you
burn proper image on eprom then if network boot is not selected local
hard disk boot kicks in.

I was also looking at ways to allow multiple network boots where user
has a choice of booting linux (ltsp) or netware. This way older clients
need not have any hard disk at all.

-- 
Sudev Barar
Learning Linux