Ubuntu installation
I installed Ubuntu 5.10 on a PIII 933 as a net install booting over PXE from my laptop. Basic documentation is available here. In order to PXE boot, you need both a DHCP server and a tftp server. The DHCP server runs on my WRT54GS v2.0 with dd-wrt v23 (using dnsmasq for DHCP), while the tftp server was running on my laptop using this nice little program.
The router setup was a interesting. dnsmasq needs a line that looks like this:
dhcp-boot=[boot-file],[tftp-server-name],[tftp-server-ip]
So mine looks like:
dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0,Monaco,192.168.xxx.xxx
But if I put that in the web config as a DHCP option, it doesn’t work. What I ended up doing what SSHing into the router, adding the line to /tmp/dnsmasq.conf, and restarting dnsmasq (”ps“, “kill [pid]“, “dnsmasq –conf-file /tmp/dnsmasq.conf“).
Setting up the tftp server was easy as pie. I simply extracted the netinst file to /private/tftpboot and started the tftp server through the application I mentioned above.
I PXE’d the server, everything went wonderfully, until I tried using sound. The sound card in the box is a SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA card. Eventually I found this thread:
sudo -s
modprobe snd-sbawe;modprobe snd-pcm-oss;
modprobe snd-mixer-oss;modprobe snd-seq-oss
I ran that and then went into System -> Preferences -> Multimedia Systems Selector and changing the audio stuff to OSS. Now audio’s working fine. Just watch out for the volume level when you test it out…