Hands-Off auto-installer --- PXE setup

First, you should look at section 4.6. Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting of the Debian release notes

In short, you need to have set up:

  dhcp
  tftpd-hpa

Then, grab a recent PXE tarball and untar it into /var/lib/tftpboot (or wherever you've pointed your tftp server)

  tar -C /var/lib/tftpboot -xvzf netboot.tar.gz

I normally then add a couple of parameters to the append line in the auto target in /var/lib/tftpboot/debian-installer/i386/pxelinux.cfg/default:

   interface=auto netcfg/dhcp_timeout=60

You're now ready to try a PXE boot. Give it a go, and read http://hands.com/d-i/ for hints on what to type at the boot prompt to kick things off.

N.B. if you have a machine that doesn't support PXE booting, you can grab a floppy that will let you kick things off.