syslinux porteus.cfg

[Ed_P]

The TIMEOUT 90 parm gives users 9 seconds to decide what option to choose but is a little quick for new users to decide what to choose. TIMEOUT 300 is a better option, imho.

The Press TAB to edit boot options doesn't tell what/how to boot once the edit or review is done. How to I get back to the menu??

The REBOOT option doesn't work for me, do I need to add an APPEND option and if so what would I add? I'm booting from a single partition Fat32 USB drive via a grub2 menu on my SSD UEFI harddrive. Rebooting the USB drive, sda1 would be fine, rebooting my grub2 system would be fine also. My grub2 menu booting my USB drive:

Code: Select all

menuentry " Porteus 5.0 USB - EFI" --class slackware   --class user-icon-porteus  {

     set bootmgr=/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi          #grubx64.efi   

     set bootdrv=$root
     search -f $bootmgr --set=root
     echo bootmgr: $bootmgr
     sleep -v -i 3
     if [ $root != $bootdrv ]; then
        chainloader $bootmgr
     else
        echo "----------------------------------------"
        echo USB drive NOT found.
        echo
        sleep -v -i 10
     fi
     set root=$bootdrv
     }

And my drives are:

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:~$ lsblk -dpno name
/dev/loop0
/dev/loop1
 :
 :
/dev/loop13
/dev/sda
/dev/nvme0n1
guest@porteus:~$

No hd0 1 or hd1 0


I'm also not against rebooting the USB drive using the approach I use in this grub2 menu:

Code: Select all

menuentry " Porteus 5.0 USB - AF'" --class slackware   --class user-icon-porteus  {

     set porteus_parms="volume=33 reboot=cold extramod=/Modules"  

     set bootdrv=$root
     search -f /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz --set=root
     if [ $root != $bootdrv ]; then
        linux  /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz $porteus_parms
        initrd /boot/syslinux/initrd.xz
     else
        echo "----------------------------------------"
        echo USB drive NOT found.
        echo
        sleep -v -i 10
     fi
     set root=$bootdrv
     }

Basically root is set to the vmlinuz file on the USB drive and the boot commands work.

Added in 20 hours 40 minutes 11 seconds:
Interesting. Fdisk sees the drives like this:

Code: Select all

root@porteus:/home/guest# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/loop0: 143.17 MiB, 150122496 bytes, 293208 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk /dev/loop1: 123.24 MiB, 129228800 bytes, 252400 sectors
 :
 :
 :
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: WD Blue SN570 1TB                       
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: E55F6DA6-193F-4C16-9701-6B3AAFAACE8E

Device             Start        End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1      2048     309247    307200   150M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2    309248     571391    262144   128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/nvme0n1p3    571392  358971391 358400000 170.9G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p4 358971392  361519103   2547712   1.2G Windows recovery environment
/dev/nvme0n1p5 361519104  396333055  34813952  16.6G Windows recovery environment
/dev/nvme0n1p6 396333056  399190015   2856960   1.4G Windows recovery environment
/dev/nvme0n1p7 399190016  962932735 563742720 268.8G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p8 962932736 1953523711 990590976 472.4G Microsoft basic data


Disk /dev/sda: 28.91 GiB, 31042043904 bytes, 60628992 sectors
Disk model: STORE N GO      
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc292499a

Device     Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *     8064 60628991 60620928 28.9G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
root@porteus:/home/guest# 

Again no hd0 1 or hd1 0.

[Ed_P]

And grub2 sees them like this:




Not just hd0,1 and hd1,1 but hd0,msdos1 and hd1,gpt1 also.

So how do we tell reboot.c32 which drive to choose?

Added in 7 hours 30 minutes :
Interesting to note: hd0,1 refers to the SSD harddrive unless the USB drive is loaded. Then it gets the honor.

[nanZor]

The current timeout is fine, but maybe I'm being selfish:

UPDATE: Perhaps one easier solution might be to keep the current 9-second timeout, but change the graphic boot screen to show in the upper right or somewhere:
"PRESS SPACEBAR TO PAUSE"

One of my hardware configurations that I use a lot the keyboard does not wake up for any distro until past the splash / boot screen. Bios issue. Thus I cannot make any choices until after full boot no matter what I try to use - except for Porteus!

Because of this, any system I try to install that waits for the user to press a key, waits forever for the non-existent keyboard.
Other systems, that have timeout longer than 10 seconds, causes the hardware to try and reboot the oem Chrome os which no longer exists, and frequently drops a core while waiting!

Thus, even though on this hardware I initially can only boot in Porteus graphics-mode with it's timeout of 9 seconds, works! Any changes of course without a working keyboard up front simply means that I have to go in and manually edit a cheatcode and do it that way.

But I understand - I'm just being selfish for this one single piece of hardware that I own with a funky bios/keyboard timeout.