Ubuntu 9.10 PXE installation

[Chadley Wilson]

Hi There,

I am new to Ubuntu, I just hope the Ubuntu list moderators are South African so that they understand the situation  we are faced with when it come down to pre-installing hundreds of computers with Linux.
My company intends to be prepared for the government (SITA) when they decide to move to Ubuntu as a local platform.

We manufacture PC's and are looking for a PXE solution. Is there someone on this list that can assist me in setting up PXE on Windows Deployment Services?
I can't change it to a Linux PXE due to the fact that we have considerable development investments made into WDS on windows server 2008 and you can't have two PXE servers on the network.
Also my Linux installation server will be running Linux.

I already have the WDS PXE server configured and booting  vmlinuz, the problem I am faced with presently is getting the pxeboot initrd.gz / vmlinuz to understand network installation from PXE or SLP.

http://www.deployvista.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/65/language/en-US/Default.aspx
 this is the document and a few others of similar proportions which have got me going this far.
The problem is that the net-boot only offers the option to do an internet installation.
We hardly have the bandwidth for that in SA :(

I am working in pxelinux.cfg\default (the menu)
My Ubuntu Lines for 9.10 32bit looks like this:

LABEL hardyubuntudesktop32
 MENU LABEL Deploy Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 32 bit
 KERNEL /linux/ubuntu910/32/vmlinuz
 append file=/linux/ubuntu910/32/preseed/ubuntu.seed initrd=/linux/ubuntu910/32/initrd.gz quiet splash --


I believe I am looking for append options similar to that which we get in redhat based distros, where you would use "install=ftp:<path to sources>" it seems that Ubuntu does not understand these parameters.
I have googled this for three days and can't find the "I am not a rocket scientist" answer. :)
Please note that we are presently in stage 1 of our system development and do not want to use kickstart option just yet. The default installer will suffice perfectly for now.

Final note:
I need more advanced documentation on local network installs from FTP -  or if it is simple enough what are the append parameters?



Kind Regards



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