Installing Linux on PC Engines Alix2d13 (part 2)

I have found it to be quite nice to be able to boot the Alix board over the network using PXE. Using the Debian netboot.tar.gz tar­ball and TFTP I can boot the Debian Instal­ler or a rescue system, and the for­mer lets me install Debian Linux wit­hout phy­si­cally touching the CF.

In order to make net­boot use the serial port as con­sole I have pat­ched the Debian net­boot tar­ball, and I made a script that does all the patching, just for you…

patch-netboot.sh

I have tested it with the Debian stable and tes­ting netboot.tar.gz down­lo­a­ded today and it works, and also with the daily snap­shot from Debian installer.

The script will modify the file syslinux.cfg in order to make PXE­Li­nux use the serial port, and the files adtxt.cfg, rqtxt.cfg and txt.cfg to make sure that the Linux ker­nel (actu­ally the Debian instal­ler in this case) also uses the serial port as con­sole. (Look at the script to see the actual changes. You should of course have a look at it before run­ning it, anyway.)

Making my anci­ent Net­gear WGT634U run­ning OpenWRT serve PXE ima­ges was really a no-brainer. In the Services/Dnsmasq page I ente­red the three cho­i­ces shown below, with  the pat­ched net­boot untar­red on a USB stick mounted on /mnt/sda2.

Refe­rences (other that links above):

• http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s05.html.en—about set­ting up a TFTP ser­ver for netboot.


• http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/dnsmasq-man.html—as above, for dns­masq


• http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/478—more on dns­masq
  


• http://etherboot.org/wiki/dnsmasq—even more on dns­masq and PXE