"Live" distribution PXE install server idea

I've had netbooks on the brain for the past few days now. I'm thinking about buying one for couch/living room use for the wife and I, since we use my failing Compaq laptop for web access and email. Late last night, it had me thinking about OS re-installs without physical media; considering netbooks seem to only support SD cards for removable media.

I'm not sure how practical this is, but I had an idea for reinstalling netbooks if you have another PC on your home network. I don't want to dedicate a host on my network to be a server for PXE installs (ex. Jumpstart or Kickstart), but what about a Live CD (or DVD) that has these services configured? If I needed to re-install my netbook, I'd just boot my desktop PC off the Live disk and then run the PXE install on my remote host. Does anyone know if I'm re-inventing the wheel, or if this idea is practical? I did a cursory search on Google, and didn't see any projects or distributions related to this.

On the netbook front, I'm torn if I should purchase one or not. I do own an iPhone, but that doesn't help my wife with Internet access around the house. She already has a recent iPod nano, so purchasing her a Touch would be a waste of money. I'm also seeing notebook prices dropping, and wonder if I'd just be better off buying one of those instead for a couple hundred dollars more. A co-worker of mine did mention that if I wasn't happy with a netbook, there would be plenty of interest in buying one used, and that the resale value on Craigslist or eBay would probably be about a $100 loss on my part. I'm looking at the Asus Eee and Acer Aspire One models, and I'm leaning towards this one. I would normally be interested in one using Linux since they seem to have SSD, but with the wife also being a user, I don't want to have to play sysadmin/helpdesk at home.

Red Hat Satellite 5.2 released

In an earlier post, I mentioned I was unable to fit Red Hat Satellite or Fedora Spacewalk into our infrastructure. The previous version of Red Hat Satellite required Oracle 9i (we run 10g), and Spacewalk requires a derivative of RHEL/CentOS 5 (our standard is version 4). I saw this release today by Red Hat announcing Satellite version 5.2. It now supports Oracle 10g, and still runs on RHEL4 or RHEL5. Too bad everyone is hurting now and pulling the purse strings on their budgets. It would be tough for me to ask for a RHEL AS4 and a Satellite 5.2 license now.

I wonder how hard it would be to backport Spacewalk to RHEL4?

Unhappy with Red Hat

Right now, I'm not happy with Red Hat. At least not with their sales department.

My group is interested in the capabilities of Red Hat Satellite Server, so I was going to try to obtain a trial license and download it. As far as I know, we don't have any RHEL licenses in our department. I'm sure somewhere in the company we do, since we have thousands of employees, but I sincerely doubt I'll be able to track that account down, and even then, doubt I can use it for access to the Red Hat Network. So, I applied for a trial license of RHEL and was hoping through that entry into RHN, I could also get a trial of Satellite Server. I still couldn't find that as a download, so I've made a couple of attempts to submit requests through their website on how I could evaluate their Satellite Server. No response. I would think sales people would jump at the chance to talk to a warm body that offered up their contact information.

I know there's Spacewalk, and I am interested in that. Unfortunately, it's only supported on RHEL5 compatible OS's. Our standard hasn't included RHEL5 yet; and they aren't open to "exceptions".

Any suggestions? Are there other resale vendors I could talk to that would let me have a 30 day evaluation to download and run Satellite for RHEL4?