Network Booting varies from platform to platform and application to application. For PC hardware, PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) is the standard. Most enterprise level networks cards support it, but it may be disabled by default. For PXE to work, you define information such as the tftp server and network bootstrap image to load into memory. The PXE client downloads the network bootstarp image, and then PXE hands over control of the hardware to the network bootstap image. The computer boots the network bootstrap image. The bootstrap image is a small image, usually it only has enough of the operating system to boot the computer, start up the network, and mount a network filesystem or start a Citrix, Windows Terminal Services, or X11 session. For more advanced environments, the bootstrap image would mount a remote file system and run the operating system from an image on the remote server. Mac and Sun computers for example can do this as out of the box as long as there is a working netboot. I use network booting for installing/reinstalling operating systems on hardware. I am currently using Microsoft Remote Installation Services (RIS) to deploy/reinstall WindowsXP. I also have hacked the Ubuntu netboot, Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/), Ghost Console Client boot disk, and I almost had Knoppix working but I abandoned Knoppix due to time constraints. Unattended (http://unattended.sourceforge.net) is a project for setting up a RIS like system on a Linux server. You can also just look for instructions on how to setup PXE booting hosted by a Linux server. Another Microsoft Example: Microsoft's Windows Distribution System (WDS, Server 2003 and 2008 replacement for RIS) boots the WindowsPE operating system on the client in order to copy a WDS image to the local storage. WDS is intended to deploy Windows Vista and Server 2008, but it has backwards compatibility with RIS. I haven't gotten a working WDS environment going yet. Vista and server 2008 deployments aren't high on my priority list. ;-) The Linux Terminal Server Project (http://www.ltsp.org/) is a thin client solution for Linux. With LTSP you can turn your existing PC hardware into a diskless system that connects to a Linux server via XDMCP. -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue >0; 0 rows returned