[syslinux] pxelinux menu questions

[Grant Gossett]

Hello all,

I have a few questions about the menuing system that I haven't been able 
to find in the archives (it would be nice if they were available in a 
searchable form other than having to click on a month-by month basis and 
read through them - if they are searchable I would love to find a way to 
do this but it hasn't jumped out at me).

My first question is : What is menu.c32? I see some posts of 
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default in the archived threads that have simple 
menus and use this as the "default" entry in pxelinux.cfg/default, yet I 
see no label in the rest of the file named menu.c32 (I'm thinking this is 
not right). For example:

DEFAULT menu.c32

LABEL whatever
KERNEL memdisk
APPEND somedosbootdisk.img


I realize menu.c32 is a program (com32 style?) that is found in syslinux 
3.11 under com32/modules. The question is what does it do and why should I 
use it? Is placing it as the default in a simple menu (as I've described 
above and feel is wrong) the correct way to use it? I am interested in 
displaying a menu of choices to users (e.g. dos ghost boot disk, linux 
kickstart installs, win 98 SE boot disks, etc) so that they either can 
select an option with enter or know what possible options exist. Using the 
simple menu with "prompt 1" I get what I would consider a normal LILO-like 
boot loader prompt:

boot:

However, I cannot get a list of options (labels) to display and expecting 
users to remember to answer "win98se_bootdisk" isn't really going to work 
:). This is probably a job for the advanced menus (unless my assumption 
that menu.c32 + a simple menu is actually for this purpose (i.e. it shows 
menu labels that are listed in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default) and I don't 
know how to use it correctly).

Let's say that I am stuck with creating an advanced (compiled com32) menu 
because my above assumption about menu.c32 is incorrect. So I would make 
the com32 menu file according to the documentation and my menu needs (no 
problems there). This leads me to my next question:

Do I replace the entire simple menu with just one option (say for instance 
a label that has the newly made com32 menu as its kernel and also make 
that label the default)? For example:

DEFAULT myfancypants

LABEL myfancypants
KERNEL myfancynewmenu.c32


thanks a bunch for any help clearing this up for me.

Grant