Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I have recently gotten a transnote. I got it with no cd or floppy drive and a formatted hard drive. So far I have tried a variety of usb flash drive boot methods that I have found on the internet, but none worked so I thought I would try the netboot option since I know that is possible with the TN.

I don't know too much about net booting so I went with the knoppix live cd option, since it already has everything that is needed, and I followed the instructions on babytux, but I can't seem to get it to boot.

http://www.babytux.org/articles/howto/h ... noppix.php
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installat ... erver_side

Does anyone have any suggestions, or is there anything that I need to do that I haven't done? I really want to get this computer working because it seems like a nice peice of hardware, but all my efforts have failed so far

Thanks

You're right. The TransNote has the ability to PxE boot, and therefore install an operating system over the network. However, this is not a simple process. Involved are lots of other components that need to function in order for the whole process to work.

Here's a website with a quick summary of what must be done. I'm not sure what your Unix/Linux experience is, but this person seems to have installed Ubuntu onto his TransNote. There seems to be other links on this page that may be helpful to you. Best of luck.

http://premrara.blogspot.com/2006/09/ub ... -boot.html

Thanks for your reply. After a bit more digging and thinking about what I need to do and what tools I need it didn't seem like it was that difficult! Then I found this article which seemed to be more descriptive. You just have to make sure that all the files have the correct path to the tftp folder, and the dhcp has the correct ip address and it really is that simple!

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/478

I tried it and managed to get the ubuntu boot screen on the TN, I had a quick go but couldn't install from the online servers. I will have another look and possibly see if I can understand what is being installed, and use a lighter OS