With IPFire 2.13 – Core Update 69 comes a new boot menu. Here is what it looks like:
Some newer hardware had slight problems being initialized, so we updated to syslinux, the bootloader software to version 5.0.1. With this release came some backwards-incompatible changes, that required us to change our boot menu and the logo, so I went ahead and replaced it with the one from boot.ipfire.org.
You now see a nice menu, which offers you to run the installer. Just wait a bit and it will start automatically or hit enter. You may also start the installer in text mode (i.e. non VGA mode) or run an unattended installation.
In addition to that, there is an other submenu, which offers hardware diagnostics tools like memtest86+ or HDT.
The cool new feature is, that we integrated the online boot service to the traditional CD image. So if you have a CD with IPFire 2.13 – Core 69 in your hands, and you know that there have been newer releases, you don’t need to download the new image and waste an other CD. Just select the boot.ipfire.org option and hit enter. The system will try to connect to the Internet (you need DHCP) and you will see the menu from the online boot service. That looks essentially the same, but you can install older and newer releases right from the Internet. Is that cool or what?
Because this new release of syslinux is very fresh, we worry that there are some systems that won’t boot with this CD. We also don’t know how well the online boot service works, so please help us testing! A pre-release image can be found over here. All feedback is appreciated.
Update (June 2nd): As some problems have been reported where syslinux 5.0.1 does not boot on older hardware, we switched back to syslinux 4.06. The boot menu will still be shiny and new, but under the hood there is an older version of the bootloader working.