MX Linux Forum

Hello all!

Do we plan adding netboot functional in future releases?

It's really needfully feature.

ditto.

Today a Linux distro w/o PXE support is hard to believe....

dekar wrote: Tue Jun 11, 2019 7:54 am Hello all!

Do we plan adding netboot functional in future releases?

It's really needfully feature.

Suggest to open a Enhancement request at https://bugs.mxlinux.org/,
to get better visibility.
Thanks

MX (or antiX) does not support PXE boot because:
1) The booting initrd does not include the required network components.
2) The included init script does not know anything about network boot

But Serva did it:
https://www.vercot.com/~serva/an/NonWindowsPXE3.html

Their approach consists of loading a sequence of 2 initrds included in MX's ISO and a tiny one provided by Serva;
I just got a PXE booting MX 18.3; cool.

BitJam wrote: Tue Jun 11, 2019 6:15 am As I said above, our system does not support the PXE netboot feature. Sorry.

As I understand it the plans to make the ability to boot to PXE, no? Tell me what I need to fix in order to configure the PXE boot. Did different builds to boot on PXE, but your just perfect. It spoils the inability to boot PXE software.

patpat wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2019 6:58 pm Their approach consists of loading a sequence of 2 initrds included in MX's ISO and a tiny one provided by Serva;
I just got a PXE booting MX 18.3; cool.

Tell me how you did it?

Patpat provided a link in his response. Open that link, scroll to about halfway down that page, look for the MX logo and see for yourself.

PXE support for 19.2 now available
https://www.vercot.com/~serva/an/NonWindowsPXE3.html

Hi all,
my situation related to this topic was: Thinkpad X31, optical drive broken, does not boot from usb, but working usb port.
I am not completely sure, if I get everything from this thread right, esp. if everything should have worked out fine out of the box with antiX 19.5, which I used. Otherwise:

BitJams suggestion in #8:

I think i_ri's suggestion is excellent. If you have grub running on that machine already then you can either unpack our iso file and copy over /antiX directory and add a boot entry for it or you could try to boot our iso file directly from grub. For this to work, I think you need to pass in the fromiso=xxxx cheat pointing our system to the iso file.

-> I did not try this.

BitJams suggestion in #8:

I think it is better to mount the iso file and copy over the /antiX directory to your system. If you can copy the /antiX directory to the same partition that grub is on then an entry like this in your grub.cfg should work:

Code: Select all

menuentry "MX-15 Live" {
linux /antiX/vmlinuz quiet from=hd
initrd /antiX/initrd.gz
}

-> I tried this, but it didn't work out. Booting up antiX 19.5 and 21 was ok, but the installer consequently ignored the hdd it booted from (all partitions on sda, not only the partition booted from). I would not know how to do the "small modification to the partition-info script".

What worked for me:
For the preparation (TFTP-Server) I used https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/PXE-Installation/ (which should be quite similar to https://wiki.debian.org/PXEBootInstall? ... boot_image
I used the netboot files from debian: http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst#netboot.
I copied the folder antiX from the 19.5 full iso to .../netboot/debian-installer/i386/antiX/.
I edited .../netboot/debian-installer/i386/boot-screens/txt.cfg - so it had the following entry (yes, dirty and quick...): I made an USB-Stick with /antiX/linuxfs on it and plugged it in.
The notebook then booted the vmlinuz and initrd.gz, complained about not finding the linuxfs at first, then looked for it on usb-drives, found it there and booted antiX 19.5 up completely. The installer then could use the full sda and worked smoothly till the end.

I'm late to this party. I wasted an hour fiddling with this when I should have searched here first. It appears no one submitted a feature request to Bugzilla (or I missed it in a search). Is that still a valid thing to do? If so, I will. I'm gonna rest my brain and then read this post provided by @patpat .

I'll volunteer to enhance / fix - if it's feasible and I am capable of doing so.