PXE Booting Linux
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Hi Everyone,
I have an interesting query that I’ve been googling and searching the forum for but have come up rather empty handed. Please allow me to explain the situation. Here at my office we are venturing into using a VDI platform but we are a non-profit so we don’t want to spend a lot of money on new hardware like nice thin clients. So we want to reuse our old desktops as thin clients with a minimal OS (probably linux based) that we won’t have to put a lot of effort into maintaining security and software updates. Ideally it will boot directly to a VMware Horizons View Client with nothing else on the screen. I’ve found a pre-build openSuSe distro at [URL=‘http://susestudio.com’]susestudio.com[/URL] which seems nearly perfect!
The problem with this build or any build of linux for that matter is that when booting from network it can’t locate the system files because its looking for them on a local drive. Ubuntu has a live network boot but I’m not sure how I can make it work with Fog? The alternative would be to use the Ubuntu method with a different PXE server. I’m trying to avoid having to use a separate PXE server. iPXE seems flexible enough that this should be doable but I’m not a linux expert and I’m not a iPxe expert either I’m more intermediate on both.
The goal is to get a minimal linux build with the client that we could live boot via PXE so if we needed to modify the build or update it we could do so and simply put the new build on the PXE server and everyone would immediately boot to the new build on restart. Keeping in mind the real OS they will be using will be the VDI they will be remoting to from this build.
Info of my setup if you think its relevant-
I’ve got the latest Fog 1.2.0 on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x64 box with a standard install using internal storage only and an external DHCP server.I have managed to add ISO’s to the advanced menu and boot from them but like I mentioned before they don’t finish booting because they try to find files where they don’t exist due to it booting from network.
Any help or idea’s or a step by step just for dummy’s guide would be appreciated! o_O
Thanks guys,
Keith