CargoBay

Why would you?

Have you ever searched high and low for that CD that you burned with diagnostic tools, or do you need to do fresh installation and need to burn a new CD/DVD for that single purpose?. Or the even more classic, you have a CD-reader and the installation set is on a DVD. If you have an endless supply of CD/DVD's or many optical drives at your disposal, this might not be a issue

It all depends on how often you do these things. My most personal ax to grind is the need to buy another optical drive, just for installing a operating systen once on a computer. With most modern operating systems(that are free to use) ability to boot a small kernel and then fetch the rest from the network, and by small I mean the size of a 1.44MB floppy, this can be used to simplify the process quite a bit.

Goal

Almost all Linux distributions use ISOLINUX for their boot loader on CD's and DVD's. The ISOLINUX kernel is a part of the larger SYSLINUX project and it has another spin called PXELINUX. In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to configure your network and setup a dedicated installation server that will eliminate the need for buring CD's and DVD's and has the posibility to install a large body of operating system and run diagnostic tools directly from the network.

When finished you can install Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and the ability to run a Knoppix Live CD with just plugging your computer up to your network. The system can be extended with more tools and other distributions, but this is at least a start.