Booting Nodes with Memtest86/Memtest86+ Under OSCAR 4

OSCAR 5 will bundle with netbootmgr, it utilizes the beauty of pxeboot and manage the boot option from the server. Great Feature!

This is the way to add memtest86/memtest86+ by directly modifying (or hacking I should say.) the systemimager's image. Of course the better way is to find the kernel switcher/systeminstaller script and modify it in the OSCAR 4 packages, if I have time, really. My kludge is to add an entry of kernel in /var/lib/systemimager/images/IDEimage/etc/systemconfig/systemconfig.conf (if the name of your OSCAR image is IDEimage). Also you need to copy the memtest86 booting image to the /var/lib/systemimager/images/IDEimage/boot directory.

So my systemconfig.conf looks like this, I colored the section I modified as red:

# systemconfig.conf written by systeminstaller.
CONFIGBOOT = YES
CONFIGRD = YES

[BOOT]  
        ROOTDEV = /dev/hda6
        BOOTDEV = /dev/hda
        DEFAULTBOOT = 2.6.12-1.1372_F

[KERNEL0]
        PATH = /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3smp
        LABEL = 2.6.12-1.1372_F

[KERNEL1]
        PATH = /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3
        LABEL = 2.6.12-1.1372_F

[KERNEL2]
        PATH = /boot/memtest86+-1.60.bin.gz
        LABEL = memtest86+

[KERNEL3]
        PATH = /boot/memtest86-3.2.bin.gz
        LABEL = memtest86

And you can find memtest86 at http://www.memtest86.com/ and memtest86+ at http://www.memtest.org/. Well, if you are really bored, you can modify grub splash.xpm.gz (the background image of grub kernel loader menu), just make sure it's 14 indexed colors 640x480 xpm also need to translate the color name for example gray25 to hex rgb (#404040). You can replace the original /var/lib/systemimager/images/IDEimage/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz with your masterpiece. For example like this....