PXE

This page is about using Gentoo as a PXE server to boot just about any operating system or bootable tool. Please extend it with your own experience. The primary focus is to boot live images and the page can get renamed once we have a better name for it.

Bootloaders
The article about Diskless nodes contains plenty of useful information on how to setup a PXE environment.

GRUB2
For client configuration, see for example: Setup PXE boot with EFI Using Grub2 from openSUSE kiwi

TFTP servers
So far I have best experience with.

To run it temporarily, you can use the following command line.

Gentoo installation
See:


 * Installation_alternatives

Fedora installation
The following script creates a TFTP directory tree, downloads kernel and initrd images from a Fedora mirror and configures a netbootable instance of GRUB.

Adjust it to your needs and then run it without parameters.

Now you just need to configure TFTP and DHCP so that  is available to the netbooted machine and it that it requests   via TFTP.

Ubuntu installation
To install Ubuntu to a device via PXE, simply download an Ubuntu netboot image for the appropriate architecture. Note that most of the files in the release and architecture-specific directory are unnecessary, you simply need  (about 40MB).

Extract that file to an appropriate TFTP-served directory and configure your DHCP server with the  directive to point at   for the machine or subnet in question.

Note that you will also need to give the host(s) internet access as the netboot images are configured to pull packages down from the internet.