[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.00 released

[H. Peter Anvin]

Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, after 24 prereleases and 16 days of some of 
the most intense development the syslinux world has ever seen... here it 
is!  Special thanks to my current employer, Orion Multisystems, Inc., 
for letting me devote as much time as I recently have to this and other 
Linux-related projects of mine.


3.00: New EXTLINUX for ext2/3, new "simple menu system", major code rewrite

Changes in 3.00:
         * SYSLINUX: Support FAT32 and EDD.  As an unfortunate
           consequence, LDLINUX.SYS is no longer an ordinary file; it
           is block-mapped at install time, which means it can only be
           written using the syslinux installers.
         * SYSLINUX: Reorganize the source code for the installers;
           each one of the installers (dos, win32, unix, mtools) is now
           built in its own subdirectory.  In particular, "mtools" is
           the unprivileged installer which uses mtools; "unix" is the
           privileged installer which uses system calls.
         * SYSLINUX: Completely rewritten DOS installer in C.
         * ALL: "label" statement information is now stored in a
           compressed format, which means that a lot more labels are
           permitted (500-1000 in a typical configuration, but depends
           on the complexity.)
         * EXTLINUX: New derivative, which boots from an ext2/ext3
           filesystem.
         * SYSLINUX: The DOS and Win32 installers can now optionally
           write the boot sector to a file instead of the real boot
           sector.  This is not supported in the Linux installers,
           however.
         * ALL: New NOESCAPE command, disables the "hold down the Shift
           key to display the prompt" behaviour.
         * New simple menu system, as an alternative to the advanced
           menu system already present.  See README.menu for details.
         * PXELINUX: Filenames can now be prefixed with an IP address
           or DNS name plus :: (e.g. 192.0.2.1::filename or
           server.domain.com::filename), which downloads a file from an
           alternate TFTP server, or just a :: (e.g. ::filename), which
           suppresses the common pathname prefix.  See pxelinux.doc.
         * SYSLINUX: Add an -m option to the DOS and Win32 installers
           to write an MBR and -a to mark the partition SYSLINUX is
           being installed on active.
         * MEMDISK: Give a way to query the boot loader type while
           running MEMDISK; see memdisk/memdisk.doc and
           sample/mdiskchk.c.
         * mkdiskimage: substantially improved mkdiskimage which, among
           other things, can now be used to initialize USB keys as
           zipdrives; see README.usbkey for more information.

Begin3
Title:          syslinux
Version:        3.00
Entered-date:   2004-12-30

Description:    SYSLINUX is a collection of boot loaders for the Linux
                 operating system which operates off Linux ext2/3
                 filesystems, MS-DOS FAT filesystems, network servers
                 using PXE firmware, or from CD-ROMs.  The FAT
                 filesystem version can be installed from DOS, NT, or
                 Linux.

                 It includes a sophisticated API for add-on "COM32"
                 modules, including a significant subset of the
                 standard C library.

                 It also includes MEMDISK, a tool to boot legacy
                 operating systems from nontraditional media like PXE
                 or CD-ROM.

Keywords:       syslinux pxelinux isolinux extlinux msdos boot loader
                 floppy install network ext2 ext3 pxe iso9660 cdfs
                 memdisk com32
Author:         hpa at zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin)
Maintained-by:  hpa at zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin)
Primary-site:   ftp.kernel.org /pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux
                 609156 syslinux-3.00.tar.gz
                 814465 syslinux-3.00.zip
Alternate-site: ibiblio.org /pub/Linux/system/boot/loaders
Platforms:      DOS or Linux to install.  Linux, perl and nasm 0.98.38 or
                 later required to build from source.
Copying-policy: GPL
End