Does anyone have any documentation on how an Acorn NC (specifically the 
Acorn/Xemplar Matrix NC) boots? I've got a load of them sitting in a cupboard 
at work (I work in a UK school) but no server - that was leased and was sent 
back before I had a chance to dissect it.

I know they use bootp and NFS, but I can't figure out anything more - I've 
set up an NFS export and tried things like putting Obey files called !Boot or 
!NFSBoot, RiscPC !Boot applications and so on in it but I can't get any 
further. I know it gets an address successfully and queries the NFS server 
for the path it receives from the bootp server but that's as far as it goes. 
It just sits there and says "The network connection could not be established."

I'm guessing that I probably need to use some kind of metadata file or 
special file-naming convention to allow it to determine RISC OS filetypes 
over NFS, or perhaps upload some kind of Absolute image as a sort of 
second-stage bootloader...?

Having seen how much money was spent on them I'd like to get them doing 
something useful - even having a few of them just acting as print servers 
would be preferable to gathering dust. Ultimately, it'd be nice to get them 
running X servers or something. (The school's current annual IT budget would 
buy one of them at the horrendous price originally paid...)

Thanks

Stephen Mollett