[mythtv-users] OT: Booting Hard Drive-less Machine

[Moasat]

>
> :cry:
>
> I must be totally missing the boat on this.  Most of the
> tutorials seem to feel the same as you, it just works.
> Follow these directions and it works.  I don't doubt that, I
> guess I should just follow the directions line by line and
> see if it 'just works' for me too.  I think my straying on
> certain parts is probably what's killing me.  I just really
> was hoping for a Gentoo setup for all this, and was also
> cross-breeding my environment for Live-CD; plus trying to
> include a lot of things from different how-tos for whatever
> reason (different distro, different kernel series, etc.)
> I'll drop the LiveCD setup and concentrate on the PXE to see
> how that goes.
>

I have done a few diskless Gentoo systems.  I only use one now and it is
noticably slower than some of my other systems, in part due to the hardware.
For the most part, its usable and makes a great little front end only
system.

I followed the Gentoo wiki which uses Grub's netboot abilities.  I was not
able to make much sense of the pxeboot stuff.  I'm thinking its probably
more up to date and supports more hardware but thankfully Grub works for me.

Actually getting Gentoo installed was not difficult.  Most of it I did
actually on the server machine as the wiki states (or used to if its been
updated).  I think the harder part was getting DHCP and TFTP setup and
happy.  I do recall though that any time during the process that I hit a
snag, it was because I misread the instructions.  I can't think of any point
where they were wrong, just maybe a little unclear.  In the end it did 'Just
Work'.  If you need help with some of my settings, let me know.  If I had to
do it again, I would have to bury my nose in the wikis again.