1 reply to this topic

[foxsam]

I was wondering if it would be possible to use an old laptop as a remote keyboard and monitor for a newer windows system. I would like to use gpxe to WOL the windows system before the laptop really starts booting to give windows enough time to be completely booted up.
Would I be able to also boot from an image on the windows machine or would that take to long until the gpxe server is started?

What would be the best/fasest setup so the laptop boots into rdesktop and all i see is the windows login screen. I am pretty new to linux in general. I do have a small ammount of experience using grub nd grub4dos for dual booting and booting from iso images.

thanks for all the help and especially the info on the site.

[Sha0]

I was wondering if it would be possible to use an old laptop as a remote keyboard and monitor for a newer windows system. I would like to use gpxe to WOL the windows system before the laptop really starts booting to give windows enough time to be completely booted up.

It's possible, and has been requested before. There have been WakeOnLAN patches made to gPXE, but I'm not sure they'll ever be committed to the mainline, since gPXE developers pay careful attention to just what's included, due to the typically extreme size limitations of a PCI ROM. WOL seems just a touch out-of-scope, in my opinion. gPXE is a network boot-loader, not a remote computer "waker-upper." Having said that, have a look here[1].

Would I be able to also boot from an image on the windows machine or would that take to long until the gpxe server is started?

You can enable the sleep command in gPXE. Then you could use the command inside an embedded gPXE script to attempt to give enough time for the Windows server (I assume you mean that by "gpxe server") to be fully operational. Visit the Customize button at ROM-O-Matic[2] and take a look at enabling TIME_CMD as well as the Embedded Script section.

What would be the best/fasest setup so the laptop boots into rdesktop and all i see is the windows login screen. I am pretty new to linux in general. I do have a small ammount of experience using grub nd grub4dos for dual booting and booting from iso images.
... ... ...

There is rdesktop for Linux, there's also a DOS Remote Desktop (RDP) client, or you could boot a Windows in a RAM disk and run the native RDP client. DOS might be the fastest and smallest, but it'll be pretty limited! For Linux, you might wish to boot with an initrd image that is the modern initramfs archive format, and you could include X Windows and rdesktop on there. Maybe someone has such a thin Linux file-set already available as a distribution?

[1] WOL implementation in gPXE
[2] ROM-o-matic.net for gPXE 1.0.1+