[K12OSN] using really old PCs as clients

["Terrell Prudé Jr."]

j.w. thomas wrote:
> Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:
>> Also remember that even though the floppy drives aren't working, you 
>> can accomplish the same thing with the hard disk instead.  What I do 
>> in this case is pull the old box's hard disk out of it, install it in 
>> another GNU/Linux or other UNIX-style box, and then "cat" the 
>> Rom-O-Matic image to the hard disk, like so.  This example is for the 
>> 3Com 3C905 series, and it assumes the old box's hard disk shows up as 
>> /dev/hdb.
>>
>>   terrell at thinclientmaker$ su - root
>>   Password:  (enter root's password here)
>>   root at thinclientmaker# cat eb-5.4.4-3c90x.zdsk > /dev/hdb
>>   root at thinclientmaker# halt
>>
>> Then, just pop this new "EtherBoot hard disk" back into the old box 
>> and boot from it.  If you set up one box to do all your old hard 
>> disks this way, it goes pretty quickly.  I did something similar with 
>> some EIDE Sun Ultra 5 hard disks a few years back (I used an x86 
>> machine for the cat'ing), and I had ten hard disks all config'd in 
>> about 20 minutes.
>>
>
> It would be really sweet to have a LiveCD that did this for you.  With 
> appropriate warnings!
>

It exists.  It's called Damn Small Linux.  :-)

--TP