[syslinux] Strange behaviour when using vesamenu.c32 and PXELinux

Marius Eikenes viddy at viddy.no
Wed Apr 29 04:30:05 PDT 2009


Hello,

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas and perhaps solutions around an
error i've been experiencing when using vesamenu.c32 (and the other
non-vesa menu too).
I have tried three different versions (the latest three) of pxelinux and
the other files. The problem exists in all of them.

My setup is pretty simple, filename defined in dhcpd, boot up from pxe,
starts requesting configs, and ends up fetching pxelinux.cfg/default.
(All good)
in this file i only do "include menu/main.cfg" which is the file i do
everything in.

The menu shows up, and everything seems to work perfectly, i can go in
and out of submenus, it all looks good.
But heres the catch: In some cases (on some computers), when finding the
choice i want and pressing <enter>, the menu just freezes.
It does not start downloading the kernel or initrd, it just freezes.
Ctrl+alt+delete does nothing when this happens.

e.g, one of the entries look like this:
LABEL livedistro
MENU LABEL ^Live
TEXT HELP
Current livedistro
ENDTEXT
KERNEL live/vmlinuz1
APPEND initrd=live/live.img

On some computers, selecting this entry (and others) and pressing enter
halts the menu as explained above.
But, if i exit vesamenu (by pressing ESC) to end up at the "boot:"
prompt, and type "livedistro" (the label) of this or other items, it
works perfectly.

So in the end, just the menu has this problem, typing the label (or the
command) at the boot:-prompt works when the menu doesnt.

Any ideas?

-Marius







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