pxe menu

[Elliot Peele]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 11:18:00AM -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Pablo Iranzo G?mez wrote:
> >	Have a look at pxeboot (from syslinux project) and their menu.c32 ;)

Also might want to take a look at vesamenu.c32.

> Cobbler (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) uses menu.c32 to generate it's 
> PXE menus.  menu.c32 is of course very nice.   I haven't found a good 
> way to generate submenus in though I would be very interested in this -- 
> for instance, if you were able to pick your cobbler distribution and 
> then pick profiles based on that distribution, or if the lists were very 
> long it might be more useful than having scrolling.

As of syslinux 3.54 sub menu support was added. The following example
will create a top level menu option of "rPath Linux" with two sub levels
of "rPath Linux 1.0.7" and "rPath Linux 2 Beta 2".

Example:

menu begin rpl
menu label rPath Linux
label -
    menu label rPath Linux 1.0.7
    menu disabled
label 1.0.7
    menu indent 1
    kernel 1.0.7/vmlinuz
    append initrd=1.0.7/initrd.img
label 1.0.7-x86_64
    menu indent 1
    kernel 1.0.7-x86_64/vmlinuz
    append initrd=1.0.7-x86_64/initrd.img
menu separator
label -
    menu label rPath Linux 2 Beta 2
    menu disabled
label rpl2-beta2
    menu indent 1
    kernel rpl2-beta2/vmlinuz
    append initrd=rpl2-beta2/initrd.img
menu separator
menu end

> Another problem you'll run into with menu.c32 is that it does not offer 
> a working timeout -- so once you PXE to engage the menu, the user must 
> choose from the menu... so in my case I default to "default", and 
> menu.c32 is the "menu" target -- so to pull up the menu you have to type 
> "menu" at the syslinux prompt before it times out to "default".

Not sure what version the timeout issue was fixed in, but it works in
3.62.

Elliot

-- 
Elliot Peele
rPath, Inc.
elliot at rpath.com