(sent to debian-boot a couple of days ago, but maybe more interest here)
Hi,
I'm doing some work for HP creating various flavours of bootable CDs,
and am using isolinux for i386. It occurred to me that the isolinux
work might be useful for improving the interface for the first i386
install CD. The basic idea is that you get an initial screen in the
style of the installer dialog screens, with a scrollable menu you can
pick a boot option from, and a input field for extra boot parameters.
To implement this I enhanced isolinux to support two new control fields
in its message file:
0x01 ^A Mark left- or right-hand end of the prompt field. Current attributes
at the left hand end are used to display and parameters entered.
0x02 ^B Mark top left or bottom right of menu area. Current attributes
at top left marker are used for inactive menu entries, current
attributes when bottom right marker is found are used for the
currently active menu entry.
I added a new parameter to the config file so you can specify the text
you want to appear in the menu entry for a given boot option.
I've attached a tiny demo ISO (it just lets you play with the menues, it
doesn't actually boot anything), which offers you the various options
that are being proposed for the isolinux based woody CD, and a patch for
syslinux. I've sent the patch upstream, don't know whether it will be
accepted in to the official syslinux source or not.
Cheers,
Richard
Attachment:
demo.iso.gz
Description: Binary data
Attachment:
syslinux-1.66-1-to-hp2.diff.gz
Description: Binary data