[syslinux] PXE Linux boot to F12 automatically

[Chadley Wilson]

HI There,

Firstly a bit about me.
I am a bit of an old school PXE user from the Kingdom of Gates. I have also spent years in the Linux playground.
While I have never been a programmer I am fairly competent in scripting languages, both on windows and Linux.

My occupation is "System Builder" I build operating System images and discs (not the OS itself). So I actually customize OS's. This year The Gates crowd have stepped up our game and we had to upgrade to Windows 2008 Svr, Purely to manage the new (5 year old) image format by Gates and his buddies. Wim file or Windows Image Files. I have to hand it to them. What I normally store in 1.1TB using Ghost I now store in 80GB. Pretty good, but the MS WDS PXE sucks. And there are so many limitations to the system that I am giving the PXE Linux a go on Win2008svr and I have it working and I love it.

I have 6 distros configured with our corporate branding using kickstart files and scripts to automate the installations of OS's to PC's. My idea is to load Linux on every system a customer buys from us, so that people can see, feel and try. I have deployed close to 10000 systems in the past 5 years with Linux loaded, if 2% have kept it I am more than happy.


My Problem.
The one problem I face is that you should press F12 to boot from network, if you don't -  the system must continue to boot from the next boot device.
This is not what happens to me with PXELinux 3.72, I don't press F12 and the system still boots from network.

Is there a solution to preventing this from happening?


I would really appreciate some help here.

Regards
Chadley
RHCT