[sdsnyr94]

Vitani, I have also spent this weekend working on this project. Within the next month or so I will be purchasing a Zotac Atom board and using it as my HTPC, and I want it to be diskless for noise/heat reasons.

I setup a server/diskless client in Virtualbox and from my experience so far, you could just remove Mythfrontend from starting up on the diskless client, install XBMC, and have it start on startup. If that works to your satisfaction, you should be able to do an apt-get remove myth* and completely remove the myth features from the frontend.

[s7mx1]

Oh dear, hope my hobby project does not cause too much trouble for you. I almost forgot the project totally.

The reason behind it is to try add network booting functionality to xbmcLive, which I thought it will be faster than the normal ubuntu. However I do not think live has the speed advantage any more.

Therefore I reckon it makes more sense to master a network boot disk image as follows,

• Install minimal ubuntu on a virtual machine (KVM or qemu)
  
• After installation (graphic driver, xorg, xbmc etc), add initrd hooks (the easiest would be to add module "aoe" to be loaded at starting initrdfs), then rebuild initrd image
  
• Copy the virtual machine image to your aoe or iscsi server, and setup services (dhcp, vblade/iscsi) accordingly.
  

The downside of this approach is that you will lose the ability (though you can add it manually with a bit effort) to choose which graphic driver at boot.

It's not as hard as you may think. I heard ubuntu server installation disk has the option to install to an iscsi target natively but I have not tried.

Good luck to you.

Just for my own reference, and for the help of anyone else trying this, there are two things the guide does not tell you:

1) You must call the iso "XBMC_Live-Atlantis-Beta_1.iso"

2) If you run the script to create the image (i.e. "you are brave [and] do the following in the command line: sudo ./build-xbmc-disk.sh") you need to re-mount some images before continuing to the SanBoot guide:

Code:

sudo mount -o loop XBMC_Live-Atlantis-Beta_1.iso iso
sudo mount -o loop iso/rootfs.img iso-rootfs
sudo mount -o loop,offset=213857280 xbmc-beta-4G.img bootfs

[rrambo]

Decided to wait until a gigabit switch comes in.. no need even trying right now as all I have is a 100 mbit switch... my nics are gigabit so that's covered..

As soon as I get a new switch in I'll post results on boot times.