Bug#497212: booting the lenny installer via pxe leeds to a black screen

[Jim Paris <jim@jtan.com>]

Hi,

I can confirm this bug with the Lenny installer.  The problem appears
to be caused by vesamenu.c32.  If I replace the vesamenu.c32 in the
Lenny installer with the one shipped in an earlier version of
syslinux, I can boot the Lenny installer just fine via PXE.

(Replacing pxelinux.cfg/default would also do the trick, since you
would avoid using the bad vesamenu.c32 in that case)

I tested vesamenu.c32 from the following versions of syslinux:

3.63+dfsg-1 works (md5sum 37c461708a51379b2b9e286c00245915)
3.71+dfsg-5 BAD   (md5sum 17a919bd23b8a1844b7731e670ea0388)
3.73+dfsg-1 BAD   (md5sum c7cc514d5f8ff17d8e061e4e7d36f77d)

D-I lenny uses the same vesamenu.c32 as syslinux 3.71+dfsg-5.

This is easy to reproduce with qemu:
  qemu -no-acpi -M pc -m 256 -smp 1 -boot n -hda /dev/null -net nic -net tap,script=/etc/qemu-ifup
where qemu-ifup contains something like:
  /sbin/ifconfig $1 0.0.0.0 up
  /usr/sbin/brctl addif eth0 $1

I uploaded a copy of the "good" vesamenu.c32 from syslinux 3.63
here, in case anyone else wants to test:
  http://psy.jim.sh/~jim/tmp/vesamenu.c32

This bug should probably be reassigned to syslinux but I'll let the
debian-installer team decide.

-jim