Syslinux

is a package that contains a family of bootloaders, that are a good replacement to other "advanced" bootloaders such as Grub.

Unlike Grub, syslinux is well behaved bootloader and does not need any special requirements.

The syslinux package includes:
 * syslinux - FAT filesystem bootloader.
 * extlinux - ext2/3/4 and btrfs filesystem bootloader.
 * pxelinux - network pxe bootloader.
 * isolinux - ISO-9660 (cdrom) bootloader.

This manual should be kept simple for most of common usages (extlinux, syslinux, pxelinux), for advanced usages refer to the excellent documentation inside the doc folder of the syslinux tarball (i.e. /usr/portage/distfiles/syslinux-4.04.tar.bz2 ).

Installation
Install MBR:

Set boot partition as active:

pxelinux bootloader installation
With pxelinux is possible to netboot using images that are shared through a TFTP server. This manual will assume there is a TFTP server installed, and it's TFTP root directory is in /var/lib/tftpboot. With this setup, copy the pxelinux loader to the TFTP boot dir and create a config dir.

The config dir can be used to store different configurations for your netbooted clients. When a client tries to boot, the mac adress or the ip adress is used to determine the appropriate client config file. First it tries to look for the mac adress, followed by a try on the hexadecimal representation of the client ip. Next, a character is stripped from the end of this value, until no more characters are left, or until a config file is found. If none of the tries match, the default config file is used.

The hexadecimal representation of an ip can be found with the following command:

An example config file matching occurs as follows:

Configuration
Configuration file varies between bootloaders:
 * syslinux - syslinux.cfg
 * extlinux - extlinux.conf
 * isolinux - isolinux.cfg

The configuration format is the same.

Simple configuration
This will give you a simple "boot:" prompt, similar to the one in Gentoo's Minimal LiveCD:

Menu configuration
The following configuration provides a simple text menu example.

This is done via the vesamenu module, in some cases where vesa is not compatible, the simpler menu module will work.

Copy the VESA menu module into the boot filesystem.