Bug#650979: debian-installer: syslinux boot menu falls off the bottom of the screen
Package: debian-installer
Version: 20110106+squeeze3+b1
Severity: normal
The syslinux menu on squeeze installation media is configured in such a way
that some of the menu entries, the "press TAB to edit a menu entry" message
and the help messages fall off the bottom of the screen. I tested with
netinst CDs and hd-media boot images, but I believe all installation media
are configured in the same way.
The configuration in stdmenu.cfg is this (comment included):
menu vshift 17
menu rows 10
menu helpmsgrow 15
# The command line must be at least one line from the bottom.
menu cmdlinerow 16
menu timeoutrow 16
menu tabmsgrow 18
There are 28 lines in VESA mode, according to the syslinux docs. With vshift
set to 17 only 12 lines are available for the menu: the title and the hidden
border use 4 lines so there are only 8 lines left for the menu entries. I'm
attaching a screenshot from the amd64+i386 multiarch netinst CD's advanced
menu (which is 13 lines long) where this problem is clearly visible: no item
is selected because the selection went off the screen.
Also, the "scrollbar" is not visible if the menu exceeds the configured
number of lines, so the user has no clue that more entries are available.
This is probably due to the choice of colors and the black background.
A related, minor problem is that the display becomes corrupted if you edit a
command line that is longer than one screen line: try for example to edit
the "Graphical install" item on the multiarch netinst CD. This is because
syslinux is smart enough to pull the command line within the visible screen,
but then gets confused and scrolls things around wildly.
I tried changing the configuration on a hd-media boot image like this:
menu vshift 16
menu rows 7
menu helpmsgrow 12
menu cmdlinerow 12
menu tabmsgrow 13
It may need more tweaking, but at least all the menu entries and messages
are within the screen whle still not covering the logo. Only a few menus
have more than 7 entries.
If further space is wanted, I'd suggest moving the logo up, there's plenty
of black pixels at the top of the image. IMHO, the old boot screen was
neater and looked defintely less "toyish", by the way.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.3
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable'), (500, 'stable'),
(400, 'testing'), (99, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.1.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
-- no debconf information
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