summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/isolinux.doc
blob: 90bb3d86b575ae093154e0514b8d7973aea4897e (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
                               ISOLINUX

       A bootloader for Linux using ISO 9660/El Torito CD-ROMs

		Copyright (C) 1994-2001 H. Peter Anvin

This program is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public
License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version.  There is no
warranty, neither expressed nor implied, to the function of this
program.  Please see the included file COPYING for details.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

ISOLINUX is a boot loader for Linux/i386 that operates off ISO 9660/El
Torito CD-ROMs in "no emulation" mode.  This avoids the need to create
an "emulation disk image" with limited space (for "floppy emulation")
or compatibility problems (for "hard disk emulation".)

This documentation isn't here yet, but here is enough that you should
be able to test it out:

Make sure you have a recent enough version of mkisofs.  I recommend
mkisofs 1.13 (distributed with the cdrecord distribution), but 1.12
might work as well (not tested.)

To create an image, create a directory called "isolinux" underneath
the root directory of your ISO image master file tree.  Copy
isolinux.bin, a config file called "isolinux.cfg" (see syslinux.doc
for details on the configuration file), and all necessary files
(kernels, initrd, display files, etc.) into this directory, then use
the following command to create your ISO image (add additional options
as appropriate, such as -J or -R):

	mkisofs -o <isoimage> \
		-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
		-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
		<root-of-iso-tree>

ISOLINUX will look in the "isolinux" directory, if it exists, for any
file requested.  It currently does not support accessing other
directories.  Please let me know if this is a desired feature.

Note that ISOLINUX only uses the "plain" ISO 9660 filenames, i.e. it
does not support Rock Ridge or Joliet filenames.  It can still be used
on a disk which uses Rock Ridge and/or Joliet extensions, of course.
Under Linux, you can verify the plain filenames by mounting with the
"-o norock,nojoliet" option to the mount command.  Note, however, that
ISOLINUX does support "long" (level 2) ISO 9660 plain filenames, so if
compatibility with short-names-only operating systems like MS-DOS is
not an issue, you can use the "-l" or "-iso-level 2" option to mkisofs
to generate long (up to 31 characters) plain filenames.

ISOLINUX does not support discontiguous files, interleaved mode, or
logical block and sector sizes other than 2048.  This should normally
not be a problem.

ISOLINUX is by default built in two versions, one version with extra
debugging messages enabled.  If you are having problems with ISOLINUX,
I would greatly appreciate if you could try out the debugging version
(isolinux-debug.bin) and let me know what it reports.