Bug 134752 – No netboot images for x86 available

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Marc-Jano Knopp 2006-05-29 04:44:53 UTC]

I wanted to try Gentoo on a CD-ROM- and floppy-less machine
(HDDs present, of course) via netbooting (PXE) from an old
Linux machine. As I was told in #gentoo, it seems to be
necessary to compile a kernel just for netbooting Gentoo,
which is currently not an option for me for temporary space
restrictions.

Trying Debian, for example, was easy, as they supply a
complete, yet small netboot image:

# cd /tftpboot
# wget ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
# tar xfz netboot.tar.gz
# vi /etc/dhcpd.conf
# dhcpd

Done. That's all you need to completely install Debian via Internet
(via PXE netbooting). Not even an NFS server is needed.

You claim that Gentoo is all about choice, but you don't give the
users a choice to netinstall Gentoo via a weak/small machine.

Remedy: Supply a small (Debian's netboot.tar.gz is only 8 MB!)
netboot image for x86, as you already seem to do for other
platforms (MIPS/SPARC).

I'm not the typical GUI-type of user (I use X11 only as terminal
multiplexer), and I love flexibility, but I don't think that
this IMHO unnecessary work makes Gentoo that attractive. At least
that's true for me, so I decided against Gentoo - but nevertheless,
I hereby supply constructive criticism to make Gentoo better. :-)

[Comment 1 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2006-06-08 17:29:10 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 74628 ***