Good morning, Tested, here are the results: 1. Laptop booting ipxe.kpxe from "latesl" folder available at http://mirror0.ipfire.org/releases/ipfire-boot/latest/ - ALL OK. Even more - I see the message for activating the hidden menu defined in premenu.cfg.
2. SBC (PCEngines APU1C2) - booting ipxe.kpxe from http://mirror0.ipfire.org/releases/ipfire-boot/v1.0/ - during the timeout from premenu.cfg I can press any key and setect TEXT submenu (the one that uses menu.c32) - after that I can select "Install with serial console..." - ALL OK (no duplicated characters)
3. SBC (PCEngines APU1C2) - booting ipxe.kpxe from http://mirror0.ipfire.org/releases/ipfire-boot/v1.0/ - no key pressed during timeout message from premenu.cfg - I am redirected to TEXT menu from where I can select "Install with serial console..." - ALL OK (no duplicated characters)
Steps 2 and 3 repeteated with ipxe.kpxe from "latest" - ALL works fine except some duplicated characters while loading cfg files and pxelinux.0 from boot.ipfire.org.
Dropped a request to PCEngine to check their BIOS for that duplicated characters thing. But I can also live with this behavior...
Many thanks for quick solution! Best regards, Horace
-----Original Message----- From: Michael Tremer [mailto:michael.tremer@ipfire.org] Sent: 25 august 2016 0:04 To: Horace Michael horace.michael@gmx.com; development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Re: IPFire install over PXE
Hi Horace,
On Wed, 2016-08-24 at 21:38 +0300, Horace Michael wrote:
Hi all, After several tests (using a normal PC but also a SBC with no videocard - APU1C2 from PCEngines) on installing IPFIre over PXE I’ve ended up several possible faults that lead to PXE not working:
Point A. pxelinux.0 points to a wrong server: server returns "502 Bad Gateway"
I have seen that bug before but couldn't find where that URL was in the short time that I had available.
But I found it now and fixed it :)
http://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire.org.git;a=commitdiff;h=e7c9ed3cc22f028750a64...
Here are the outputs:
TFTP prefix: http://boot.dev.ipfire.org/ Unable to locate configuration file
Boot failed: press a key to retry, or wait for reset... .........
Point B. Premenu.cfg loaded by menu.gpxe (http://boot.ipfire.org/menu.gpxe ) has default menu the vesa menu and the submenu that should allow me to select between vesa and text are declared hidden. Therefore I can't select the text interface when I am booting from an SBC without video card - only option being the serial console = text menu - menu.c32.
Extract from premenu.cfg:
menu hidden timeout 30
menu title Select menu type menu autoboot Press any key for options or wait # second{,s}...
label vesa menu default text help The default graphical boot menu. endtext menu label Graphical menu kernel vesamenu.c32 append menu.cfg?arch=i586&platform=pcbios
label text menu label Text menu text help Use this menu if the graphical menu does not work on your system. endtext kernel menu.c32 append menu.cfg?arch=i586&platform=pcbios
Actually the BIOS should tell the menu that it doesn't support graphics AFAIK.
Point C. Old .kpxe files from v1.0 folder (http://mirror0.ipfire.org/releases/ipfire-boot/v1.0/) don’t duplicate the characters on screen while the other .kpxe files (including the ones from latest - http://mirror0.ipfire.org/releases/ipfire-boot/latest/ - generate duplicate characters after loading the .kpxe and download from boot.ipfire.org starts.
We discovered that this is a bug of the BIOS of the APU.
On other systems that worked fine.
I think by now this could be a little outdated. If you need sources for our changes and want to update the loader, please have a look here:
http://git.ipfire.org/?p=oddments/ipfire-netboot.git;a=summary
Patches are always welcome :)
Printscreens and additional details on forum: http://forum.ipfire.org/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=15250#p100110
Best regards, Horace
Best, -Michael