[syslinux] syslinux compatibility with modern Linux distributions

[Martin T]

Hi,

I remember I had a bootable USB flash drive with few Linux
distributions four to five years ago. iso files for Linux
distributions and initial ramdisk(copied from extracted iso file) and
Linux kernel(copied from extracted iso file) were on the USB flash
drive. So I tried to create something similar with latest Ubuntu and
in order to keep things simple, I did not add any additional
distributions at first. Content of the bootable USB flash drive is
following:

# ls -l usb/
total 1066232
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   21276686 aug   16 13:11 initrd.lz
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root      32256 aug   16 11:47 ldlinux.sys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        113 aug   16 13:00 syslinux.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1064304640 aug   16 13:11 ubuntu-14.04.3-desktop-i386.iso
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    6191392 aug   16 13:11 vmlinuz
#

Content of syslinux configuration file looks like this:

# cat usb/syslinux.cfg
DEFAULT Ubuntu

LABEL Ubuntu
LINUX vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=initrd.lz
iso-scan/filename=/ubuntu-14.04.3-desktop-i386.iso
#

Now if I try to boot from this USB flash drive, the system seems to
behave like it does not find an optical drive and ends up in BusyBox.
I also tried with latest Debian and Kali Linux. Is there a mistake in
my configuration file? Or is it not possible to boot Linux
distributions like that any more?



thanks,
Martin