Netbooting a Linux image ?

[galgot]

I’ve been playing with BootMania :

http://vivapowerpc.blogspot.fr/2013/09/bootmania-is-now-freeware.html
http://www2.tba.t-com.ne.jp/beanz/
installed on a Titanium, and by luck one mirror for downloading Nixes for making netboot images was still alive ! Managed to make a netboot image of OpenBDS4.0 PPC.
All fine and dandy, a Pismo booted on it
Now i’m wondering if there is a way to make a netboot image of a Debian, as it would surely work in BootMania, but the download BootMania mirrors are all dead for that one.
Tried to do it from within BootMania, but it doesn’t want to select a Debian.iso for making one. Tried also making one with Apple’s System Image Utility, but it seems to have problem with .iso too. 
Anyone have experience doing a Debian (any version) PPC netboot image that would work ?

 

[Cory5412]

My guess is that these network images were all prepared by someone to be a full OS install as an img or dmg file on the host system running bootmania. That is, for example, how the os 9.2.2 netboot image was built by Apple.

You would probably have to ask the person who built the ppc ubuntu netboot image how they did it and then replicate those steps on Ubuntu.

 

[galgot]

Yes indeed. I've checked into the debian plist file inside the BootMania, the downloads address all leads to ".../netboot/ " end directories, so it seems they were already prepared images for netboot. Will investigate if there a way to make in linux. thks.

 

[Gorgonops]

Hrm. I downloaded the documentation to BootMania to try to figure out exactly what it means by "netboot image", and was disappointed to find that it was very terse and unhelpful on that subject. Is your intention to boot an entire working Linux installation over the network with NFS-mounted filesystems (and is that what BootMania does?), or do you simply want to try booting the Debian installer (contained inside a ramdisk) over the network? The requirements for the latter are relatively to set up by hand. For the former you'll essentially need to copy the contents of a working Linux installation into a directory (or into a disk image which you'd then mount) and share that via NFS. But...

I've checked into the debian plist file inside the BootMania, the downloads address all leads to ".../netboot/ " end directories, so it seems they were already prepared images for netboot

If you look at the Debian FTP site you'll find the netinstall initrd.gz, kernel, and yaboot files in a ../netboot directory. This same directory is generally present on Debian CDs. The ramdisk just includes an installer that allows you to install from an ftp (and possibly nfs or https, it's been a while) server, which can either be a main Debian mirror across the internet, or a local host if you share the contents of the CD appropriately. Other than this "image creation" facility it basically looks to me as if BootMania is simply a front-end for configuring and enabling the various daemons (dhcpd, tftpd, nfs, etc) and (seemingly) juggling the contents of OS disk images so parts of them can be shared via NFS, etc. My *guess* is that if Bootmania does anything more than take the kernel, yaboot, and initrd files, share them via TFTP, and set up DHCP appropriately it's that it might set itself up to share the contents of the install CD it's scripted to get those things from as needed for a local install.

So... honestly, I'm guessing if you found a linux, any linux, that it still "likes" and will generate an "install image" for you could probably, worse case, dive into the resulting image (and the TFTP share directory, etc) that is sets up and replace the contents with the matching pieces from a more current Debian (or whatever) and it'll work. Of course, by that point you're probably not saving much over just following the Debian manual.

 

[galgot]

YAw ! it works
Thks a lot, didn't even knew there was that /netboot directory on Debian servers.Indeed it just does what you say , grab the files from the /netboot.
So I tried this :  open the BootMania.app warper, then make a copy of Debian40PPC.plist file that is in /Contents/Resources/, rename it to Debian8PPC.plist. Open with Property List Editor, change the values accordingly to
- "Description  String"  to  "Debian 8 (Jessie) PPC"
- in "Sites" add the address you provided , Debian oldstable (Jessie), netBoot directory.
- "Version  String" to 8

When you relaunch BootMania Debian 8 PPC magically appear in the drop-down downloadable images menu, and you can download and create a install image. It creates the Debian8.nbi file in /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/, that can be opened as a warper. Looks like this :

Then you can serve that install image :

i'm installing on a Pismo now

Now yes, it's a Boot install, a NetBoot with a installed system is something else. And BootMania doesn't support it for Linux or BSDs anyway, only Mac OS 9.2/ OS X and darwin.

 

[Gorgonops]

Hah! It's funny it was just that easy. The fuzzy non-documentation had me wondering if it was doing something like fetching .isos, mounting them, and pulling bits off, but apparently it was a lot less complex than that.

 

[galgot]

Yep it's very cool. Jessie is now installed on that Pismo, on an expansion bay hd. That is why i wanted to try this, no cd drive.
Works very well , Tiger and os9 on two parts on the internal hd, and Jessy on the expansion bay. It boots on yaboot giving me choice to run os9 , X, or debian.
Working servers for older versions can be found at archive.debian.org too. Managed to do a debian 4 net install image with the same trick. Will check for same thing for ubuntu and fedora.