I'd like to implement a mechanism to load REMOTELY in a different OS with a wake-on-LAN card. For exemple, I want to choose remotely:

- Slackware 10.x
- Fedora- FCx
- Windows 2000


My best!

It's nearly impossible. There is no network on the bios level. But you can do this:
1) boot to default os using wake-on-lan;
2) make a script which connects through ssh, becomes root, edits lilo.conf, where changes default os, runs lilo and reboots the computer;
3) boot new default os;

P.S. This won't work when the default OS would be Windows because there isn't lilo and so you can't choose what to boot.

There is a protocol for this. If your BIOS supports PXE, you can boot over the network.

Here are some links:

http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot...on_Environment

If you get this working, please let us know what you did.

Wow, that's interesting Randux. Gotta read. Didn't know that you could order bios what to boot.

I have it on my BIOS, but I haven't used it. It's actually annoying, because I want to boot from USB, and I can't, but I have this useless option

Knoppix Cd gives the possibility to start booting from USB.

If the BIOS supports it, you can boot anything from USB (*doze, Linux, *BSD, etc). My BIOS doesn't support it

As I understand, initial booting starts from CD (USB drivers are loaded). After that, data files are loaded from USB, which is more better way cause in the end you have loaded OS which could write into the USB stick.

If you mean that it's a way to save data for the live CD, I have seen this with a few distros. Basically what happens when you have a live CD you have only r/o filesystem right? So this is just a way to save anything you change on USB. But it is not booting from USB.

If the PC supports booting from USB, then you can put everything on a memory stick and not have to use any CD at all. It's a very nice way to carry multiple OSs in your pocket........

You could carry the cd which lets you boot from usb, the same way floppies let boot from Slackware cd1 when the bios doesn't support it. I hope you understand me correctly.

If I can carry CDs, it's all I need...after that USB doesn't have any advantage for me.

I think i have an idea (pay attention please, i have one every 1000 years).

-1 You set up a server with multi PXE/bootp configurations (one for Slack, one for Debian, zero for window$, etc...).
-2 You create a script that runs the particular PXE/bootp server then wake on lan the particular client (ether-wake is simple to use).

You can play with multiple ethernet card too, as they have different mac adresses.
I STRONGLY suggest intel pro-100 (or whatever the bandwidth) ethernet card because i never had problem with wol. Even 3com gave me headaches.