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Make Solus bootable via PXE
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Description

Let's make it possible to boot Solus over the network via PXE!
Possible applications:

  • Installing without creating a USB stick every time
  • Easy deployment and boot in corporate networks
  • Diskless installations?

It may not have much users (at the moment), but it's cool to have and shouldn't require too much work.
What I learned so far

  • PXE booting should be relatively easy thanks to dracut which just loads the squashfs image via HTTP/NFS/whatever
  • However our initrd doesn't support this yet, we need to enable the dracut modules livenet and network
  • The network module requires arping in return, which is provided by iputils
  • Adding the modules here and that should be it (in an ideal world)

But I can't test it because I don't know how to build an ISO with local packages. Is solus-image-gnome still being used? Any hints or other ideas?

Event Timeline

@der_eismann just look at the commit dates and you'll get to know if solus-image-gnome is still used 😄

Yeah that's what I thought, but I didn't find anything else. How are they built nowadays?

Like this.
I am also interested in knowing how I could build an iso with local packages. I gave it a try recently but fetching all the packages needed, building the index and pointing all this on a local web server, but it was complaining it wasn't finding the system.base component although I had all the packages of that component available.

Ah I think I misunderstood. The solus-image-*desktop* repos have recent commits, but no new release for Solus 4, that's why I was confused.

JoshStrobl added a subscriber: JoshStrobl.

We have no plans on supporting PXE booting or network-based installs.

Well that is of course something you can't argue with.