Can I boot off a CD if my BIOS/CD doesn support boot? A: Yes, with a little help from a boot floppy: Smart Boot Manager.
Q: Can I boot off just a floppy? A: Well, you can mimic etherboot with a floppy even if your NIC doesn’t have a boot ROM. This mean you can use a floppy to connect to the DHCP and TFTP server and download the rest. Maybe a bit slow during boot, but it works well. Goto http://www.rom-o-matic.net/ and download an image for your NIC. Follow the instructions on that site to make a net bootable floppy. * Q:Can’t I avoid the TFTP server? A:Yes, but obviously only if you boot from local media. If you don’t need any reconfiguration of Thinstation once it is built, you just hardwire all configuration with thinstation.conf.buildtime Otherwise you have to set STORAGE_PATH=… correctly in thinstation.conf.buildtime and supply a thinstation.conf.user with the path STORAGE_PATH/thinstation.profile/thinstation.conf.user. * Q:Can’t I avoid the DHCP server? A:You must boot from a local media then. Setup all the network parameters in thinstation.conf.buildtime build the image. * Q: Cool!
