SUSE Lesson 16 EXTLINUX

Back in SUSE lesson 5 we did look at the GRUB bootloader. GRUB is fine but for servers it may have more features than we need. Citrix in XenServer 6 has changed from GRUB to EXTLINUX. openFiler the nas storage distribution uses extlinux as does Citrix XenServer, and you may consider the same. If nothing else though, setting up a boot-loader from scratch will help your understanding and can be carried forward into PXELINUX, ISOLINUX and SYSLINUX as they all use the same configuration files. So what ever I set in my extlinux.conf can be used in my isolinux.cfg files etc.

We need the syslinux package installed, in SUSE that is set with the zypper package but will differ on your distro. We can use the command extlinux –install /boot to add the sys file for extlinux that we boot to. We need to add an entry to the MBR by using the command cat /usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sda . Finally we create a file /boot/extlinux.conf with entries similar to this:

		DEFAULT sle
		LABEL sle
			KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz
			APPEND root=/dev/sda2 resume=/dev/sda1 initrd=/boot/initrd

Reboot now we should boot to EXTLINUX and load the configuration set.