Playing with PXE with marginal success

[acemilo]

So I recently found amahi-netboot and have been playing with it. The 2 apps it installs (PBA and Memtest+) work just fine, however every other distro I try to pop on there doesn't work. I've tried clonezilla, parted magic, and ubuntu. Clonezilla looks like its gonna work, then says there's no nopassword user found and kicks me to a login, ubuntu boots the splash screen then dumps me to a terminal, and parted magic tries to boot then just sits. I've followed tutorials, the wiki, and forum users examples and none are working properly. If anyone has done this stuff before and wants to help I'd appreciate it, even if anyone could point me somewhere for more info I'd appreciate it. I really like this PXE stuff, but getting stuff booting properly is a bear!

Thanks again

[bigfoot65]

Check out the wiki for some guidance.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Netboot

You will notice a list of apps at the bottom of the wiki page that have already been packaged for Amahi. They are currently in ALPHA/BETA status as more testing is needed.

There is also this tutorial that one of our users has provided.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Amahi_Netboot_for_noobs

[acemilo]

Yea, I followed the guide in the wiki and like I said, the stock apps that come with it work great, but the ones in the guide aren't working for me. I followed the guide for Parted Magic step by step but it will not boot no matter what I try. I know there are some apps in testing, but at the rate these apps take to go into the pool of available apps to everyone, I'm sure it's not going to be for at least a year or longer (I'm still waiting for virtual box to come out of beta).

[bigfoot65]

Ok. The BETA apps are available if you subscribe to Amahi for a small fee. These apps are still not live as they can be complicated to install and do not always work.

As for VirtualBox, you are best installing it manually.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/VirtualBox

This is one of those apps that may exceed the capabilities of the Amahi install platform. It is quite large and there are so many settings that must be configured.

Apps that stay in beta for a long period of time are typically not stable. That is why you may not see the PXE apps or VirtualBox. While they install fine for most, they often do not for all. We hope to move more apps live once Fedora 16 for Amahi is completed.

Keepp in mind, the Amahi-Netboot is for advanced users mostly. While a good guide will allow the rookie linux person to install, it does present a challenge when they do not work. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet that help, its just hard to find them some times.

If you would like to see how to install Parted Magic, please PM me your amahi.org user name and I will give you access. You can then install it and see how things are configured.

I may try to add something in the wiki soon, time permitting that gives a better explanation on how to make this all work.