[syslinux] SYSLINUX: Neither prompt nor menu?

Rene Herman
2014-03-30T23:43:26Z

Good day,

I was expecting this to be a FAQ but haven't been able to find an
answer... how would I arrange to, normally, not be presented with either
prompt or menu when booting, yet be still able to call up prompt/menu
when needed?

If the right answer is "set PROMPT 0, provide a DEFAULT entry and no UI
entry" then that doesn't work currently, in the sense that it is then
impossible to interrupt the boot even when needed: syslinux pays no
attention to ALT or SHIFT in that case (and responds to CTRL by
commenting that "this system has only 622K of DOS RAM, whereas this
version of syslinux needs 9K to boot!" -- which I will assume to be an
unrelated buglet).

Setting TIMEOUT to 1 with UI={vesa,}menu.c32 gets me a rather annoying
flash while booting which I wanted to avoid -- but I only noticed not
being able to now intervene anymore until I actually quite needed to. At
which point I noticed it definitely enough that I've now regressed to
LILO...

I'm an Arch Linux user and LILO isn't a supported choice, and I would
like to return to syslinux. Is ALT/SHIFT not working without a UI
statement just a bug? If not, can syslinux do what I want?

Regards,
Rene