[syslinux] Bootable Floppy w/ Networking & Shell?

[Gustavo Guillermo Pérez]

El Miércoles, 18 de Enero de 2006 12:53, Jason Gerfen escribió:
> I realize this is probably the wrong list but since some of the
> principals this list deals with are similar in nature I figured it
> could't hurt.
>
> What I am looking to do:
> Provide a solution to either boot from a floppy disk, establish a
> network connection, give user the ability to run utilities such as fdisk
> and dd. as well as provide the same solution as a PXE bootable image.
On this list someone was published a PXE multiboot floppy.
You can use this floppy to load PXE stack for most compliant network cards.
Then, you can boot a small initrd and a big kernel with the most popular 
network drives on there, switching with chroot on a NFS network folder, you 
can have a big linux console running with less memory, (16MB or more).

You can use busybox if you wish, and if you like tellme the popular network 
cards you own and I can build a demo floppy, that can establish a network 
connection, and has not build the drivers, do some probes to load only the 
ones, and uses a udhcpcd to set up the network card.

Then you can mount a NFS volume and do a chroot.

And of course you can use memdisk to emulate floppy boot trow the network, 
with PXE.


> My question:
> Does anyone on this list have a solution in place such as this, or
> perhaps a method (the simpiler the better) to create a bootable floppy
> with these three requirements?  I have been looking around and so far I
> have found solutions which require me to build a stipped down kernel
> with specific network card support, creating the filesystem and
> installing the kernel and any utils I need.  Is there any solution
> anyone knows of which is less cubersome?
>
> TIA

-- 
Gustavo Guillermo Pérez
Compunauta uLinux
www.compunauta.com