Running Linux Installers from Windows Remote Installation Service (RIS)

There may be a time when you need to use some ancient Windows software to deploy a Linux O/s... setting up a Linux PXE / TFTP system is no fun at all and far too obvious a solution! Anyway here's how to use RIS (WDS running in Legacy) to launch a Linux network install (or could be a LiveCD etc...)


RIS looks for a .sif file in your images folder, so make a new folder for your install then create a /i386/templates/pxelinux.sif file (you can call it whateveryoulike.sif) and it needs the following -

[OSChooser]

Description="Whatever You Are Installing"

Help="Linux install blah blah blah"

LaunchFile="%INSTALLPATH%\%MACHINETYPE%\templates\pxelinux.0"

ImageType=Flat

Version="1.00"

 Version can be whatever you like, as can the description and help. You need to copy pxelinux.0 from your distro to \templates and from there it basically runs the same as it would on a Linux PXE/TFTP server... so have a look at instructions on how to get that working from there.

pxelinux.0 looks for a pxelinux.cfg directory which usually has a file "default" which is a plaintext file detailing the boot menu and pointing to the relevent initrd.img file you're trying to load... there will probably be one of these files in your linux distro's isolinux dir and you can mess around with it to give different boot options.

Anyway thats basically how it's done, information from a variety of sources and some trial and error!