[lug] Installfest in 4 weeks.

[Bear Giles]

David L. Anselmi wrote:

> I'll have blank CDs there to make copies of whatever distros show up. 
> We had a lot of luck with the etch business card CD (network install) 
> last time. If you want a particular distro speak up while there's 
> still time for me to grab it and burn it.

No promises, but it looks like you can set up an unslung NSLU2 so that 
it runs a boot server(*) that, in turn, lets you select an installation 
image. "Installation of Woody with PXE" at Debian discusses the process 
with the Woody floppies. Most recent hardware supports PXE so you could, 
in theory, connect the ethernet cable, reboot, select the distro from a 
short menu, and be dropped straight into the installer. No need to 
bother with CDs unless the victim, I mean newborn penguin, wants one.

You can also cache the standard packages locally so you don't have to 
pull them across the relatively thin pipe to the outside world. Just set 
up apache on the unslung NSLU2.

(*) "Boot server" is just DHCP, TFTP, pxelinux.0 (from syslinux) and the 
kernel image(s) and optional memdisk root images in the tftp directory. 
Or you could set up an NFS root fs on the NSLU2.

Bear