[Fwd: Re: [syslinux] Comboot Menu]

Murali Krishnan Ganapathy gmurali at cs.uchicago.edu
Wed Jan 21 09:15:20 PST 2004


Thanks for the comment. The next pass for a file format ...

------ FILE BEGINS -----
# Comment lines

[menu]
item="text to display"
status="status line text"
action= SUBMENU | INACTIVE | whatever
submenu= <number>
data="arbitrary string"

item="text to display"
status="status line text"
action= SUBMENU | INACTIVE | RUN | EXIT
submenu= <number>
data="arbitrary string"
....

[menu]
....

----- FILE ENDS ------

The number of menu's and the size of menus are computed. But there is a
limit on how much they can be. This limit can be changed by modifying a
couple of #define's at appropriate places. The same goes for all the 
decoration: All attributes, fillchars,.... are all #defines. Just change 
them and you are all set. In case anybody wants this to change from menu 
system to menu system, then they can modify the code appropriately.

Now each item has five pieces of information. The item and status are obvious.
action is SUBMENU or INACTIVE or RUN or EXIT, the menu code only identifies
SUBMENU and INACTIVE and ignores everything else. If it is INACTIVE the obvious
thing happens. If it is submenu, then choosing that option goes to the menu
number defined in the submenu field. The data field is not used by the system 
at all. 

The intended use is that it will contain the name of the kernel to run. So once 
the menu system returns a pointer to this datastructure, the user will see that
the action is RUN and execute the kernel specified by the data field.

- Murali

Marc Haisenko wrote:

>On Tuesday 20 January 2004 16:34, Murali Krishnan Ganapathy wrote:
>  
>
>>Thanks for your reply. Here is my first attempt at a file format for
>>describing the menu.
>>
>>menus      5 # I am declaring 5 menus numbered 0,1,2,3,4
>>menusize 10 # All of them have atmost 10 items
>>

>>Are these two necessary ? Can't you compute them from the rest of the file ?
>>
>>    
>>
>>startmenu 1  # The main menu is menu number 1 (is this needed? or should
>>I just assume menu 0)
>>    
>>
>
>I would default to 0 but having such an option would be a nice thing.
>
>  
>
>>Any comments?
>>    
>>
>
>Looks like very powerfull and nice to me ! Now the next step would be 
>customization stuff like menu colors ;-)
>
>  
>
>>- Murali
>>    
>>
>
>C'ya,
>	Marc
>
>  
>






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