Re: Preventing Lilo from clearing the screen

["L. C. Robinson" <lcr@onewest.net>]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Jason Castonguay wrote:

> I apologize if this question has been asked before, but it
> appears that Lilo clears the screen at its prompt.  I want it
> not to clear the screen so that when I get to Linux's login
> prompt, I can push shift-page-up to go back and see some of the
> stuff the CMOS puts on the screen before a system actually
> boots.

Interesting: I have used lilo for years, and have never had it clear the
screen, so I just had to find out how your setup was making it do that.
So I searched /usr/doc/lilo-0.21/README, which is the ascii text
version of the lilo manual, and found:

   MESSAGE=<message_file>  Specifies a file containing a message
      that is displayed before the boot prompt. No message is displayed
      while waiting for a modifier key ([Shift], etc.) after printing
      "LILO ". In the message, the  FF  character ([Ctrl L]) clears the
      local screen. The size of the message file is limited to 65535
      bytes. The map file has to be rebuilt if the message file is
      changed or moved.

> Is there a command or something that I can put in lilo.conf to
> keep it from clearing the screen?

No, adding stuff won't help, but from the passage quoted above,
you can REMOVE the FF character from the message file (I assume
you have one with some BEL characters (^G, aka control-G), for an
audible prompt -- mine rings 3 times, from a ^G at the end of each
line of the menu).  If you don't need the message file at all,
comment out the "MESSAGE=xxxx" line in your lilo.conf, and the
problem should go away (don't forget to invoke lilo after the
change).

LCR

-- 
L. C. Robinson
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