netboot.me: Turning 'netboot' into 'internetboot'
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under coding, app-engine, tech, netbootme
After a couple of weeks of concerted effort, I'm pleased to announce the initial release of a new service, netboot.me. Netboot.me takes regular netbooting and makes it a whole lot more versatile - now, you can netboot directly into the installers for many popular linux distros, as well as system tools and even live linux distributions, all directly over the Internet, and without any local configuration required!
All that's required to set up netboot.me is a spare writable CD, USB key, or floppy disk to write a small (less than 1MB) disk image to. Alternately, determined geeks can change their DHCP server to allow computers to netboot directly. Once you've done that, booting off the device on any computer with wired ethernet (wifi is a work in progress) will automatically cause the bootloader to download the current version of the menu from netboot.me, which you can then find the boot image you want to boot from. Selecting it causes the boot image to be downloaded and booted immediately.
Currently on the boot menu:
- Installers for several popular linux distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian).
- The FreeBSD installer.
- Tiny Core and Micro Core Linux ...