Debian – How to configure syslinux to boot immediately

Many commandline tools take arguments. There are one-letter, short, arguments and ... long arguments. They change the default behaviour of such a tool.

Short arguments are prefixed with a single dash - Long arguments are prefixed with a double dash --

Short arguments can be combined into ls -l -t -r is the same as ls -ltr. Long arguments need to be distinguished from combined singles, and to do that, a long argument is prefixed with a double dash ls -l -t --reverse or ls -lt --reverse

Long arguments are easier to remember, short ones faster to type.

Most commands have a manual page which explains these arguments in detail. Eg. man ls for the manual page of the ls command which I used in my examples above.

I've never tried this myself but I found these details on the ArchLinux wiki. In a article aptly titled: Syslinux. There's a section titled: Chainloading other Linux systems.

excerpt

Chainloading another bootloader such as Windows' is pretty obvious, as there is a definite bootloader to chain to. But with Syslinux, it is only able to load files residing on the same partition as the configuration file. Thus, if you have another version of Linux on a separate partition, without a shared /boot, it becomes necessary to employ Extlinux. Essentially, Extlinux can be installed on the partition superblock and be called as a separate bootloader from the MBR installed by Syslinux. Extlinux is part of the Syslinux project and is included with the syslinux package.

So assuming you have a system with Grub2 like so:

• /dev/sda3 (/)
• /dev/sda2 (/boot)

You'd mount them like so:

$ mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
$ mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot (only necessary for separate /boot)

Then with extlinux installed you do the following:

$ extlinux -i /mnt/boot/syslinux
$ cp /usr/lib/syslinux/{chain,menu}.c32 /mnt/boot/syslinux

And create this file: /mnt/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg:

timeout 10

ui menu.c32

label Other Linux
    linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux
    initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img
    append root=/dev/sda3 ro quiet


label MAIN
    com32 chain.c32
    append hd0 0