[syslinux] SYSLINUX: Neither prompt nor menu?

[Rene Herman]

Good day,

I was expecting this to be a FAQ but haven't been able to find an 
answer... how would I arrange to, normally, not be presented with either 
prompt or menu when booting, yet be still able to call up prompt/menu 
when needed?

If the right answer is "set PROMPT 0, provide a DEFAULT entry and no UI 
entry" then that doesn't work currently, in the sense that it is then 
impossible to interrupt the boot even when needed: syslinux pays no 
attention to ALT or SHIFT in that case (and responds to CTRL by 
commenting that "this system has only 622K of DOS RAM, whereas this 
version of syslinux needs 9K to boot!" -- which I will assume to be an 
unrelated buglet).

Setting TIMEOUT to 1 with UI={vesa,}menu.c32 gets me a rather annoying 
flash while booting which I wanted to avoid -- but I only noticed not 
being able to now intervene anymore until I actually quite needed to. At 
which point I noticed it definitely enough that I've now regressed to 
LILO...

I'm an Arch Linux user and LILO isn't a supported choice, and I would 
like to return to syslinux. Is ALT/SHIFT not working without a UI 
statement just a bug? If not, can syslinux do what I want?

Regards,
Rene