Hey Elmar.
A bit of feedback on what happened, if you don't mind.
So in the end I could achieve what I wanted to do (reset vmware's ESXi root password on a headless server) using your plop distro of Linux.
This server machine on which ESXi is installed would only allow network boot, no CD, no USB.
So I followed your instructions about the PXE boot and it worked fine but somehow ploplinux itself couldn't be loaded, just what comes before ploplinux itself, so in my guess whatever is in syslinux right ?
However at the stage where the error message occurs there is an option to plug in a USB drive or a CD and, since I had made a ploplinux CD I put that one in and ploplinux could fully load, sweet. Saved my life.
In the end I did a mix between a network boot and a completion with the CD.
I am not in front of the error screen right now but it was complaining about an unfound path on \\10.0.0.1\ploplinux
If this doesn't ring a bell to you I can reproduce it to paste here the exact error message but it was happening at the mounting of samba (if that makes any sense), so it would fail but leave the option to plug in a CD... which worked as I just explained.
Anyway this is more out of curiosity as I managed to do what I needed to do but yeah I'd be keen to manage this network boot properly for the sake of learning.
Nevertheless, thank you again so much for your help and for producing this lightweight distro that's got all one needs for troubleshooting really.
Cheers!
- dindeman