Hi, My oldest son (16) has been begging me to hack an internet appliance since the I-Opener days. So this time I figured, OK I'll pick up a MSN Companion before they are gone. So.. I am waiting for mine, I hope it has a "breakable" flash. Anyhow.. Here's some ideas:
Has anyone built up a unit that boots off the
network? I checked netboot, there's no support for USB drivers. So what about booting with a minimal kernel and do a nfs root moount for Linux? That would make it simple to manage and we won't write to the
Flash too often. Also, can the same be done
with Windows? My plan is to have multiple
flash cards that will boot different Operating System. I'll have some command line stuff set asside to determine what OS I want to boot. Or I can update the Mac address on the network device with the boot
program and the boot server will resolve what
operating system I want to boot.
Has anyone tried this?
Here's what I have for hardware:
128MB CF (Mr. Flash ($44.00! from newegg)
PCMCIA to CF adapater (use my company assigned laptop to dump images)
Compaq A1 refurb
DLINK 10/100BaseT USB adapter (pegasus type)
Linksys 802.11 USB adapter (I'd really like to get this to work later)
My first try would be Linux since I use that
all the time. It should be easy to do a nfs root mount. So hopefully all I need is the
/boot partition on flash! Anyone have any
knowledge of doing a root mount?
Next attempt would be for Win98, is it possible to get a simple shell going off of
flash, enought to get net start running, do
a samba network login to my file server, mount the filesystem as C:\ and then
fire up win?
If this works this would be a cool hack!
