Diary of a Network Geek

The trials and tribulations of a Certified Novell Engineer who's been stranded in Houston, Texas.

7/29/2004

Slaving over hot BOOTLOADERS

Filed under: Fun Work,Geek Work,Linux,Novell — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is in the early morning or 7:22 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waxing Gibbous

My eyes are practically crossed!

I’ve been going around and around with the Novell ZENWorks Imaging boot CD Linux partition trying to get it to boot a laptop via a USB CD-ROM for the past two days! I guess the good news is that I’ve made progress.
For those of you who care, but don’t know, the ZENWorks imaging boot.iso was built with ISOLINUX/SYSLINUX, which are pretty close to the same thing. I know because I’ve practically rebuilt the whole damn Linux disk image it uses when it loads! So far, I’ve added the menuing system that I worked on last week and added support for the USB drives on a Dell laptop into two of the Novell default menu items. Oh, and I also set it to pull DHCP settings when it boots off the USB drives, too. I’ve been testing that on a Lexar Media 256 MB USB JumpDrive, BTW. And we made that happen with ISOLINUX. When I get it all worked out, I’ll burn a CD and we’ll make sure it runs from there, too. It’s been a real challenge, but it’s pretty cool to have a real technical challenge to work on for a change. Sometimes it’s frustrating since I’m doing this on my own laptop and that means I don’t have a regular system yet, but I figure that it’s “motivation”!

Anyway, when I get it all done, I’ll post all the scripts so that other folks and use them if they want.
Oh, yeah, I also installed Mozilla earlier this week. I “upgraded” my Netscape and found that I couldn’t send or reply to e-mail anymore! Damn! So, I went to the “source” so to speak and, so far, it’s been great. Mozilla is what Netscape is based on and you can’t hardly tell the difference, at least in the UI. (Which is a fancy way of saying that I like it and I’m very comfortable using it.) I highly reccomend it to you, especially if you’re looking for an IE replacement!!

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4 Comments

  1. If you like Mozilla, you should give Firefox a test run. Firefox > Mozilla > Netscape > IE. IMO…

    Comment by jale2ice — 8/2/2004 @ 7:53 am

  2. ryumaou: sounds interesting.. would love to see your zw usb cd-rom when you’re done

    mike mcyr@maine.edu

    Comment by mike — 8/12/2004 @ 5:20 pm

  3. ryumaou: Hows the USB boot loader traveling? I am most interested in how it turned out as I’m sure Novell would be to.

    Comment by Steve — 9/22/2004 @ 12:18 am

  4. I’m never sure if I should reply here, or via e-mail. Well, I’ll do both, I suppose.

    It’s working out fine, but Novell’s latest incarnation of the boot.iso, available from Novell Forge has everything that I built into mine and more. It’d be best to check theirs out and adapt it to your environment.

    Comment by Network Geek — 9/22/2004 @ 6:19 am

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