[syslinux] A simple question re. syslinux

Roman Mitnitski roman at checkpoint.com
Sun Jun 30 07:39:38 PDT 2002


   Hi.


 I'm trying to make a simple boot floppy that would choose
between booting with serial console or with keyboard/screen based
on user's input.

 In the ideal world, I would like to have the following behaviour:

 On the serial console, it would show the welcome screen and say
 "Press Enter now to boot from serial console"

and on the VGA screen (at the same time) it would show the usual welcome
screen


 If the user presses Enter (i.e. gives indication that he's using serial
console) during the
timeout period, we go with serial boot option
 If the user does nothing or presses Enter on VGA console, we go with VGA
console
entry.


 So far, the closest I can get to this is the following syslinux.cfg:

serial 0 9600
default console
prompt 1
timeout 60
display boot.msg
label console
  kernel kernel
  append initrd=ramdisk lang= devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=7168
label serial
  kernel kernel
  append initrd=ramdisk lang= devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=7168 console=ttyS0

 (and I would enter 'serial' or "console" to choose at the ldlinux prompt).

 Unfortunately it does not quite work - because I can't seem to feed the
input to the
ldlinux prompt from the serial.... When I type enything on VGA console, it
is also
displayed on serial, but I can't enter anything via serial port..... I know
that the serial
port itself is working, because I can use it from Linux that boots using the
"serial" option....


 Any ideas on
 1) How to make the "ideal" loader within the limits of ldlinux?
 2) Why can't I get input from serial?

 Thanks a lot

 Roman




More information about the Syslinux mailing list