[syslinux] pxelinux menu questions

[Murali Krishnan Ganapathy]

The simple menu (found in com32/modules) reads your config file and 
displays its contents for user selection. For that reason the config 
file allows you to "Configure" the menu using certain keywords. The 
advanced menu on the other hand currently does not read the config file 
and hence the menu contents need to be hard coded into program before 
compiling it.

So if you use the advanced menu, and put that as the default entry in 
your config file, it is not necessary to put the user choices there. 
However, it will be a good idea to do it anyway. It gives you the 
possibility of switching menu systems and more importantly, allows you 
to type something in the boot prompt directly in case any/both the menu 
systems are giving you problems.

Hope this answers your question.

- Murali

Grant Gossett wrote:
> 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
>
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