Include Puppy Linux

Puppy Linux will boot from the fog pxe menu without too much trouble. I prefer this to DSL as it has a more modern kernel (2.6 vs DSL's 2.4) and the drivers that go along with it. DSL-N is seems to be no longer maintained, so that's not a great option either. However, Puppy is a bit heavier than DSL, at 130M. These instructions have been tested with Puppy 5.1.1 and Fog 0.2.9 running on Ubunut 10.04.

First, download the puppy iso to your home folder, then mount it so you can get to the files inside. Note, add paths to these directions as needed.

mkdir /tmp/puppy
mount -o loop -t iso9660 lupu-511.iso /tmp/puppy/

So far, the only way I've found to get Puppy to PXE boot is to include the main file (sfs extension; lupu-511.sfs for Puppy 5.1.1) inside the ramdisk itself. You will need to copy the initrd.gz to a temporary folder, then embed the sfs inside it. Thanks go to jamesbond for the embedding instructions. So...

mkdir /tmp/junk
cp /tmp/puppy/initrd.gz /tmp/junk
cp /tmp/puppy/lupu-511.sfs /tmp/junk
cd /tmp/junk
mv initrd.gz initrd.gz.old
TMPDIR=`mktemp -d XXXX`
cd $TMPDIR
zcat ../initrd.gz.old | cpio -i
cp ../lupu-511.sfs .
find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -9 > ../initrd.gz
cd ..
rm -rf $TMPDIR

Next, you need to copy the new ramdisk and the vmlinuz to a tftpboot folder, which you make.

mkdir /tftpboot/puppy
cp /tmp/junk/initrd.gz /tftpboot/puppy
cp /tmp/puppy/vmlinuz /tftpboot/puppy

Now update the pxelinux menu settings (in the file /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default) adding the following entry at the end:

LABEL Puppy Linux
        KERNEL puppy/vmlinuz
        append initrd=puppy/initrd.gz
        TEXT
        Puppy Linux
        ENDTEXT
\n

At this point, you should be done. Test it out. Do be aware that the initrd.gz will take about a minute to load (on a 100 Mb network) connection. Hope this helps someone else.