Am 08.10.2012 04:39, schrieb Damjan Georgievski:
Is there a way to boot the install medium over PXE similar to ArchBoot?
Yes, it's on the wiki somewhere.
If you have a fast internet connection (10MBit/s or more), you can use this: https://releng.archlinux.org/pxeboot/
As far as I understand that is an image that then downloads the install media from some server on the internet. We already have a PXE (dhcp/tftp) server in our hackerspace and a locale Arch mirror with the packages. I just need to add the install media so that we can install Arch even if offline (which happens).
You are right, this is mainly for one-time installations and such. The cleanest way (in my opinion) to do this is exactly the way that I did with the online pxeboot environment (there are other ways (like loop-mounting the whole ISO or using memdisk), but they all download more and use more memory). 1) Extract the ISO with bsdtar -x --exclude=arch/boot/syslinux --exclude memtest* --exclude pkglist.* -f archlinux-2012.10.06-dual.iso arch/ This will result in a directory structure exactly like this: ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/iso/2012.10.06/arch/ Put this on an http server. 2) Use a gPXE or iPXE-extended pxelinux version, like gpxelinux, or a custom version built from pxelinux and iPXE (for example, you can include native ethernet drivers to speed up the early download). You need this so you can use http downloads from the bootloader (you could put the kernel and initramfs on TFTP instead, but you need HTTP for the later stage anyway, so why bother). 3) Add the following to your pxelinux configuration: LABEL arch_x86_64 TEXT HELP Boot Arch Linux (x86_64) live medium. ENDTEXT MENU LABEL Arch Linux x86_64 LINUX http://servername/arch/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz INITRD http://servername/arch/boot/x86_64/archiso.img APPEND archiso_http_srv=http://servername/ archisobasedir=arch checksum=y ip=dhcp (Similar for i686) This will download the kernel from http and boot it, download the squashfs images into memory (about 200MB total) and boot the live system. I guess this will do what you are looking for.