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 cdrecord 1.9), 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 \ -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \ -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \ ISOLINUX resolves pathnames the following way: - A pathname consists of names separated by slashes, Unix-style. - A leading / means it searches from the root directory; otherwise the search is from the isolinux directory (think of this as the "current directory".) - . and .. in pathname searches are not supported. - The maximum length of any pathname is 255 characters. 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.