[K12OSN] Booting older thin clients

[Petre Scheie]

No, it's part of the x86 architecture, the same way it 'knows' to ask 
the floppy drive or hard drive for some sort of boot code.  I've got a 
486 from 1994 or so with a bootrom NIC and it boots just fine (I just 
use it for showing off).  Any PC will do.

Petre

Michael Blinn wrote:
>  Yeah, my adult users would lose the CDs (;
> 
>  Does the NIC with bootrom route require a semi-new BIOS that can 
> recognize a NIC as a boot device? If not, from a purely intellectual 
> standpoint, how does the computer know to boot from it?
> 
> Thanks Petre,
>  Michael
> 
> Petre Scheie wrote:
>> You can boot a thin client from a CD, just like you can boot one from 
>> a floppy disk.  And you can still use the CD drive and the floppy 
>> drive for Local Device Access (LDA).  But there are some tradeoffs.  
>> First, to use the CD or floppy drive, users will have to remove the 
>> boot CD/floppy, which means they're going to lose the CD/floppy or 
>> scratch/break it or forget to put it back in, etc.  If your users are 
>> all adults, this might, MIGHT be manageable; but if your users are 
>> kids, I think you'll find it frustrating.  BTW, LDA does not support 
>> music CDs in the clients.
>>
>> You can buy a NIC with a bootrom for $20 at disklessworkstations.com. 
>> These are great, and you never have to worry about losing the boot 
>> media.  Of course, using an etherboot CD or floppy is cheaper, so it 
>> really depends on what your priority is.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> K12OSN mailing list
> K12OSN at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn
> For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
>