[syslinux] DBAN and vesamenu.c32

[Henry Kemp]

Peter - thanks for getting back to me so promptly - we're running
syslinux 3.11-4.

 # rpm -qi syslinux-3.11-4
 Name        : syslinux                     Relocations: (not relocatable)
 Version     : 3.11                              Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.
 Release     : 4                             Build Date: Tue 22 Aug 2006
03:29:18 PM BST
 Install Date: Thu 01 Feb 2007 03:31:28 PM GMT      Build Host:
hs20-bc1-6.build.redhat.com
 Group       : Applications/System           Source RPM:
syslinux-3.11-4.src.rpm
 Size        : 1324399                          License: GPL
 Signature   : DSA/SHA1, Wed 04 Oct 2006 04:28:13 PM BST, Key ID
b44269d04f2a6fd2
 Packager    : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
 Summary     : Simple kernel loader which boots from a FAT filesystem
 Description :
 SYSLINUX is a suite of bootloaders, currently supporting DOS FAT
 filesystems, Linux ext2/ext3 filesystems (EXTLINUX), PXE network boots
 (PXELINUX), or ISO 9660 CD-ROMs (ISOLINUX).  It also includes a tool,
MEMDISK, which loads legacy operating systems from these media.

>From what I can see DBAN is using version 2.4.33 of the Linux kernel.
The virtual machine I'm running has  500MB RAM so that shouldn't be an
issue. And it looks like a graphical cursor - I'll send a print screen
of it to you off list if thats ok!

Rgds,

Henry

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Henry Kemp wrote:
>> I'm integrating DBAN (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) into our PXE boot
>> menu system (using vesamenu.c32) but it just hangs when I'm using
>> vesamenu.c32 and confusingly when I revert our menu system to using
>> vesa.c32 it works ok. I've stripped out any extraneous configuration but
>> it still seems to have the same problem.
>>
>> When I use this in pxelinux.cfg it boots into DBAN ok:
>>
>>   default menu.c32
>>  
>>   LABEL DBAN-1.0.7-i386
>>         KERNEL images/dban/vmlinuz
>>         MENU LABEL DBAN-1.0.7-i386
>>         APPEND init=/rc nuke=dwipe floppy=0,16,cmos root=/dev/ram0
>> initrd=images/dban/initrd.img
>>
>> But when I change menu.c32 to vesamenu.c32 and select the DBAN option
>> from the menu I just get a cursor at the bottom left of the screen and
>> it hangs there indefinitely...
>
>> The system I'm testing it on is a VMWare virtual machine so I don't
>> think that is necessarily an issue. The tftp server is running on Centos
>> 5.1 thats fully up to date with patches.
>
> What version of syslinux are you running, and do you know what version
> of the Linux kernel DBAN uses?
>
> It sounds like it doesn't revert to text mode (you get a *graphical*
> cursor, right?) and then DBAN gets confused about the resulting mode.
> The screen is supposed to revert to text mode before being handed
> over, so this is odd.
>
> The other option I can think of is a memory collision.  Is this on a
> small-memory machine?
>
>     -hpa
>
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