How to network boot?

[IsaacKuo]

I've been given an old Pentium 120 with fanless heatsink and fanless power supply (it USED to have a fan, before something very violent happened to the PSU). I'd really like to turn this into a silent system, such that the only noise is some floppy drive grinding during bootup.

Does anyone know how to do this? The system is far too unsophisticated to boot directly off a network, so I figure that it'll first have to boot off a floppy. So...how do I get it to work? Obviously, I need to make the floppy somehow, and I also need to set up the file server somehow. I have no clue how to do either.

Thanks!

[mdwatts]

What distro/version? Every distro should have readme's and bootdisk images on their installation cd's or ftp servers.

G4L search results for 'PXE' (http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=pxe&btnG=Google+Search) (network boot).

[IsaacKuo]

I don't know what distribution to try--we're talking a Pentium 120Mhz maxed out with 32Mbytes of RAM, so it's going to have to be running something lean and mean. This hardware is far, far, too old to have PXE. It'll need to boot off of a floppy first.

Thanks for the pointers, though! I'm sifting through to see if I can find something suitable.

[mdwatts]

For a P120 and 32mb, most here would suggest Debian or Slackware.

Have a look through the '.iso confused - which distro?' forum as you will find 'which distro' threads for similiar hardware as yours.

[dkeav]

you could setup a terminal server and use that machine as a thin client

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Diskless booting for Linux (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Diskless-HOWTO.html)