To what extent is this possible?

Without the hassle of EPROMS and boot roms in the ethernet card - lets say that

there is a small local hard drive.

How do you get the kernel to load - or MUST that load from the local drive?

Can most of the rest be remote - including swap files, and the rest of the root structure.

Are there special permissions required on files/directories for all this to operate.

Its just that Linux like everything else does seem to require an increasing amount of hard disc

and the possibility of using older slower machines as Xserver clients would be undermined if

the 540MB limit on some old motherboards - not to mention to 210MB hard drive thats there.

Of course there might be a fair amount of paging with limited RAM. Do you really need 16MB as

a minimum to run LINUX as an Xserver client only? (How did they ever manage UNIX on mahines with

4MB or less?)

Alan Davies
Head of Computing
Birkenhead School