Lately I have had a need for an extra computer, and by chance I have got a Pentium Celeron 500 MHz computer sitting around. The problem is that hard drive on this computer has gone bad, but it does have a cd-rom and a sloppy drive, both of which are working fine. Even though hard drives are pretty cheap now a days but I have decided to take this on as a challenge and set it up as a remotely booting Linux machine.
In order to build a machine that doesn’t require even a single input source (i.e. floppy / cd-rom) you have to have a card that supports Preboot eXecution Environment (or PXE). Unfortunately the card that I have installed in that computer does not support PXE so that option is gone. From my research so far there is at least one package out there that can emulate a PXE somehow. Thats all I know about it for now… I am able to successfully set this up then I will try to put a tutorial to do it, that is, unless I find one thats already pretty good. 🙂