Quick question about Networking with linux and booting...

[absentandy]

I was wondering if there is anyway to boot Linux to init 3 off of a flash drive, load all network, smb, and nfs drivers, mount a network filesystem, and continue booting into init 5 off of the network??? I'm an intermediate Linux user, so help would be great... I'm trying to make a diskless set-to-box that does a partial boot off of the flash and turns over to the network for the rest (kde, etc.)
-THANKS!

[Roxoff]

This is already handled by the linux filesystem heirarchy.

If you boot into runlevel 5 and mount various bits of the filesystem using NFS from another server, you can achieve what you need.

Take a look here:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.pdf

You probably need to keep /etc /tmp /bin /sbin /var /boot & /lib local and mount /usr /home and /opt from the lan. Most of the application binaries are in /usr somewhere.