On Monday 09 September 2002 19:36, Bernie Zenis wrote: [sxplanation snipped]

So, it isn't quite there yet; but, it could be? Does anybody out there

think that Darwin will eventually have the capabilities to work from a

diskless (or from a non writable disk) machine?

I believe Mac OS X (and therefore also Darwin) can be netbooted. Apple sells just this thing with their Xserve machines, and it works like I described. It uses some odd DHCP configuration, and some folks already reverse engineered it. Please check out this URL: http://mike.passwall.com/macnc/

I know hardware is a lot more robust these days; however, I think that

it would be a great selling point from the Mac to have an OS that runs

without disks. "Without disks" can mean a user/sys admin decides not to

use a disk, the disk crashes, power is out and the disk(s) are "shut

down" with the system still going, or whatever you can think of. Maybe

it would only really be a selling point for Mac servers and computer

geeks (like me :-).

I have had much luck with netbooting NetBSD on my iMac. OpenFirmware knows DHCP and tftp, so that Just Worked(tm). It's not impossible, in fact, it's very possible, maybe even doable to netboot Darwin/OS X from another *nix box. The only thing it needs for it being more useable is better documentation. It's not rocket science :)

...

Hope that cleared stuff up a bit.

Yes, thank you.

No problem :) Cheers, Emiel -- To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.