Tag Archives: network

Installing OS over PXE on machine without USB/optical drive

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I got a little second-hand Dell D430 laptop to use for my upcoming polargraph show. I’m actually really impressed, it’s a dinky little thing.  No optical drive however, and installing an OS from a USB memory stick didn’t seem to work.  So I’ve done it over the network, and it even seems to work.

PXE (Pre execution environment) is the method, and this is a way of booting over LAN.  Hit F12 on the POST screen and then boot from NIC.  There needs to be a server on the network with TFTP running on it, to dish up the necessary files.  This is hard, but there is a nice little app called SERVA that handles the TFTP/DHCP stuff, because I don’t know how to.  Anyway, I followed the instructions on this site and windows 8 is winging it’s way onto my new old machine.

Issues:

I initially tried putting the windows 8 disk in and symlinking to it instead of copying the files into the TFTP source folder.  That worked up to a point, but the installation failed.  I think it is because SERVA needs to add some files to the windows installation to customise it for this method, and obviously that can’t work if it’s read-only (on a CD).   So actually copy them over, or at least make sure they are somewhere that is writable.

Accessing raspberry pi by name rather than by IP address

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I’m using a virgin media superhub that does DHCP, but doesn’t have any kind of DNS stuff in it.  So I can ssh to my pi using it’s IP address, which is inconvenient because it makes me go and look the address up in the router.  For my application (the alarm clock), both devices (the pi and the kobo) need to be able to find each other, or at least the kobo needs to be able to find the pi to register itself.

I’m guessing there’s smarter ways of doing this, but until I am schooled, I’m working on these lines:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=34620

http://cymplecy.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/auto-install-a-simple-samba-setup/

So the pi is samba-able now.  I guess samba uses netbios, and that’s the enabler for hostname resolution.

So now I can hit raspberrypi from my windows machine.  However, I suspect, I also need to netbiosify the kobo, and I guess that won’t be as easy.

Put Pronterface on pi.

Get VNC working: http://gettingstartedwithraspberrypi.tumblr.com/post/24142374137/setting-up-a-vnc-server

Install pronterface: http://entropyprojects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/reprap-printing-from-raspberry-pi.html

Instead of copying the files from github manually, install GIT with sudo apt-get install git then do git clone https://github.com/kliment/Printrun.git to get the files.  Skills.