[syslinux] Debian bug#604245: Syslinux fails (does not receive key presses on Sony vaio Z12C5E)

[Ferenc Wagner]

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:

> On 11/24/2010 07:34 AM, Ferenc Wagner wrote:
>
>> Syslinux certainly used to work partitionless.  Maybe this feature was
>> inadvertently lost during the major version change...  Peter?
>
> It's possible... it's also possible there is something in memory which
> looks like a partition handover table.

But would that have a fighting chance to break keyboard interaction
only, after displaying a correct menu?

György, could you please make sure that it's a keyboard issue only, for
example by introducing a short timeout by replacing "timeout 0" with
"timeout 50" in syslinux.cfg?  If your pendrive is /dev/sde, then do

# zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/sde
(just as you did originally, resulting in this bug report)
# mount /dev/sde /mnt -oloop
# sed -i '/^timeout/s/0/50/' /mnt/syslinux.cfg
# umount /mnt

and then try to boot the installer from the pendrive.  Now it should
automatically choose the default item in the boot menu after 5 seconds
(unless syslinux is actually frozen by this time).

Independently of the above, I wonder what the SYSLINUX banner says if
it's started partitionless (like above) or from a partition (like when
you dumped it into /dev/sde1).  In the working case it's easy to find
out by quitting the menu via ESC then pressing Ctrl-V.  It will probably
print "SYSLINUX 4.02 debian-20101014 EDD Copyright ...".  In the first, 
non-working case it's easiest to get this by renaming syslinux.cfg, so
that it isn't found, thus the banner isn't overwritten by the menu.
Maybe this unbreaks your keyboard, even... :)
-- 
Thanks,
Feri.