[mythtv-users] Network Booting

Andy Laurence andy at andylaurence.co.uk
Tue Feb 3 08:24:27 EST 2004


I've had a search through the archives, and the only reference to network booting I can find is MiniMyth (LinPVR.org).  This seems to be biased to the MiniITX boards.  I've got a project I'm in the process of gathering data for.  Basically, I want to equip each room of my house with a TFT to display TV (from Tivo), play music, and the like.  Everything MythTV does!  I plan to use a low-spec server in my rack to run the backend, and possibly house a Hauppage 350 card in the future.  This server is also going to run Misterhouse for home automation tasks, but that's another story!
 
Anyway, for the front ends, I plan to use some PII laptops.  They should be capable of playing video (I used to watch DivX on a PII 333MHz machine), and are in the chucking out pile in the workshop, hence the right price!  As I don't want a huge noise in each room, and the PCs are all identical, I plan to network boot them.  The problem here is that network booting doesn't seem to be well documented, and I'm hardly a Linux expert (I get no experience at work, and time at home is limited).  Looking at the latest release of MythTV from the weekend, it seems it supports framebuffer mode.  It strikes me that this could be used to create a generic front end network boot kit, as I believe framebuffer mode is driver independent.
 
Am I heading in the right direction?  Can anyone point me to a simple howto for network booting?  <hopeful mode> Has anyone started, or is about to start a similar project? </hopeful>
 
Cheers,
Andy
-- 
http://ha.andylaurence.co.uk


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list