Introduction
Every Linux user, after a while, starts creating a toolbox that he/she takes with him/her everywhere. However, that depends on the task at hand. You might need to install a distribution, you might just need a livecd, doing security-related work or just backup. And so the toolbox gets bigger and bigger, thus becoming less and less convenient. The subject of today’s article is NetbootCD. NetbootCD is not a supplement for a live Linux environment, but rather it is designed to help you install multiple Linux distributions using a single multiboot disk as oppose to requirement of 7 Linux installation disks.
In this sense NetbootCD is a CD disk that will allow you to netinstall various distributions by offering you a simple menu so you can choose distro/version and other simple options. From this reason a decent Internet connection is absolute must. You will only need the knowledge to install your distribution of choice, which nowadays is a walk in the park, with simple and easy to use installers present in many Linux distributions. We will show you how to use the NetbootCD and also how to hack it in order to add more distributions to the list, provided you have some scripting knowledge. Actually, you can use the disk also as a basic live Linux distribution, but more on that later.
Getting NetbootCD
NetbootCD is based on Tiny Core Linux, so you won’t have to get some huge ISO. One can download disk images and put it on a CD. There is also an option to put it on floppies, but that will not be dealt with here, since floppies are error-prone and almost extinct. The above link will guide you, however, should you really want to choose the floppy way. We recommend at least 512 MB of memory, more with Fedora, because the kernel and initrd images of the distros you choose will be downloaded to RAM. Now, let’s see what we get with NetbootCD.
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