Christian Hofstaedtler «ch:#grml» pointed me to an article about netboot.me, a service providing bootable Live and Install variants of some OSes over the Internet (via gPXE and HTTP transport, mostly). They offer a bootable floppy/disc, USB stick, and El Torito ISO image. One gets a graphical menu if not careful, out of which there is no escape, and which isn’t compatible with most graphics cards, but if ^B is pressed quickly enough, there will be a usable command line.

An experimental MirOS bsd4me bootable image is available as well:

gPXE> autoboot
gPXE> chain http://netboot.me/2032

This will be loaded via plain, unencrypted HTTP from our main webserver. It’s the usual <5 MiB Mini-ISO for the i386 architecture and contains a full installer, as well as e3 and tinyirc known from MirOS bsd4grml. Source code of the GPL’d parts and overall licencing information is also included inside the ISO image. Please remember this is for beta testing only. We do not support MEMDISK boot methods with our second stage boot(8/i386) loader, as these are not reliable.

On an unrelated side note: dutch Windows XP Professional is weird. Translations were laughed at by several dutch-speaking people in the mksh IRC channel, but I was able to disable Blåtand on “blau” (the new IBM X40, successor of “bleu”). And it works!

A more related side note: when virtualising MirBSD, do not use VirtualBox. If you do have Vanderpool/Pacifica available and enabled, both the OSE and the full edition may be viable, but kvm is the better option. If VT-x/HVM is not used, it does not emulate the i386 architecture properly. Use qemu, kqemu, kvm, bochs, VMware Server 2 (not 1 — timekeeping is broken in there), Microsoft® VirtualPC 2004, Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion for Macintosh, … instead.

Tonight and the last few days have seen several releases of things like MirMake, the package tools, etc. You might want to upgrade your MirPorts Framework checkout. (We now have enough Lua tools to access the Simtec eKey, I just need to order one. We’re currently at 2¾ interested people, not quite enough to make sense.)