Hi,
for years I’ve been using the method of installing Ubuntu desktop machines by putting the netboot image on a TFP server, then booting the desktops via PXE and automating the Debian installer using a preseed file.
For Groovy, no netboot image is available anymore and the download page points me here.
I could not find proper documentation for booting the new installer via PXE. There are several problems with what I could find:
- Post 1 at Netbooting the live server installer has some kind of steps, however they require you to download pxelinux.0 from Eoan(!).
- Post 6 at Netbooting the live server installer mentions that the kernel and initrd will be published separately, so we don’t have have to extract them from the ISO. Publishing the kernel and initrd separately doesn’t seem to have happenened, at least I could not find it.
- The method described in post 1 requires each client to download the full ISO into a ramdisk when booting. This is already problematic for the server image at about 900 MB, but is much worse for the desktop image with a size of almost 3 GB.
Consequently, some questions arise:
- Does anybody know where to get pxelinux.0, kernel and initrd for Groovy for booting via PXE?
- Is there some way around each client having to download the full desktop image?
To me it seems that the new installer does not take established workflows and use cases into consideration at all. Having to load almost 3 GB instead of a few MB when booting a client is madness.
I hope that somebody can shed some light on this. Since the linked posts were made by @mwhudson I’m mentioning you here, I hope you can help.
Thanks,
Marian