Re: "Dual Booting" linux thin client or windows

Sid Arth wrote:
> Is it possible to "dual boot" into either normal windows (booting from
> the harddrive) or linux which is stored on the network? Ive looked into
> something called pxe a little, but that looks more like a one way thing.
> Linux only and it seems you need some sorta special bios for it.
>

Most modern BIOSes can boot from a network PXE server. What you'd do is configure your BIOS to boot first from the PXE server, and then if that process fails or is canceled with a user's keypress, it was fail-over to boot from the hard drive (or CDROM, or USB device, etc etc etc) and thereby start up your other OS.

> I was wondering if there is something where you could pick which OS you
> want to load, and if you pick the linux one, it will boot off a server
> on my network.
>

Once the BIOS finds the PXE server and starts booting from it, I believe you can have the PXE serve out whatever you want, such as the startup of a Debian boot, or the normally earlier stage of GRUB menu, which would give your users the ability to pick-and-choose from a menu which OS they want to load.

Again, I haven't done this, so don't know the specifics of doing it, but I am confident it can be done.

-- 
Kent


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