/ 2011-09-30

I'm preparing a presentation on PXE booting for hcc mediadag 1 oktober 2011.

As I don't have much time to prepare I want to do the demo using the Heavy Duty Boot environment at home. I set up a not-installed virtual machine in VirtualBox and it only worked once, crashing ever since (the virtual machine crashing and powering down before the pxeboot was finished). A websearch came with the suggestion to disable the VT-x/AMD-V options for the virtual machine: #2536 (PXE Boot failure -> Fixed in SVN) - VirtualBox. Upgrading VirtualBox will probably fix this, but I'm not going to upgrade it one day before I use it in a presentation.

I also added a simple menu for the demonstration: this makes the inner workings easier to see than via vesamenu.c32. PXELinux Setup from Joseph Newman was the first sample I found on this. But the 'Heavy Duty Boot environment' is funnier and shows the full power of pxelinux.

I found simple FreeDOS images at FreeDOS: FDOS site which I could also add to the pxelinux menu. So I can boot FreeDOS and get a real A:\> prompt. On a virtual machine.