I want to set up a machine which would run without a hard drive, preferably on linux. Would this be possible? Would it be possible to load linux from a server on a LAN? For example, could we have a floppy boot disk which would initialize the download of Linux and then launch the appropriate components at boot time? Or any other ideas? Thanks

EtherBoot Project

You should be able to boot Linux using PXE on most modern BIOS / ethernet boards, search for PXE documentation, specifically pxelinux (a loader).

You will likely need tftp and nfs for later stages of getting the system running however.

Mark

Thanks a lot, that looks great

Gentoo provides a step-by-step guide on how to do that (and the communtiy will help you alot), seems pretty easy if you ask me :) Check it out at

http://www.gentoo.org

Wesley