Lilo's black and white menu.

Hi: I have just written the MBR in a new machine of mine using lilo. The lilo menu is a red rectangle with two entries: one for each one of two OSes. Now I remember once I had the lilo menu in black and white but I don't remember how I did it. Could you tell me how do I get the black and white menu?

I just replaced my last Lilo with SysLinux and the man page is gone, but I'm sure 'man lilo.conf' has it.

Originally Posted by Emerson I'm sure 'man lilo.conf' has it.

Yes.

It is not just that the screen is black and white. There is no rectangle and the two entries appear on the upper right corner of the screen.

Hopefully this will help. From a slackware64-current clean installation. This is what I use in all of my installations only difference is a different Boot BMP Image.

# Boot BMP Image.
# Bitmap in BMP format: 640x480x8
  bitmap = /boot/slack.bmp
# Menu colors (foreground, background, shadow, highlighted
# foreground, highlighted background, highlighted shadow):
  bmp-colors = 255,0,255,0,255,0
# Location of the option table: location x, location y, number of
# columns, lines per column (max 15), "spill" (this is how many
# entries must be in the first column before the next begins to
# be used. We don't specify it here, as there's just one column.
  bmp-table = 60,6,1,16
# Timer location x, timer location y, foreground color,
# background color, shadow color.
  bmp-timer = 65,27,0,255

Now I remember. When you are installing slackware there comes the moment when it asks if you want to install lilo. There are three options: simple, expert and skip. You choose simple and the installer writes the boot loader in the MBR and writes no lilo.conf, which is unfortunate because in that way you can't see how it does to have that menu screen. If you have a spare machine, try it and you'll see.

The simple option will still generate a lilo.conf. It's impossible to run lilo to store the bootloader without some form of a lilo.conf.

Also, the simple option will generate the needed code for the boot screen within the lilo.conf. I'm not sure what caused your system to not have it. You could try running liloconfig again...

Originally Posted by stf92 .....You choose simple and the installer writes the boot loader in the MBR and writes no lilo.conf........

That has not been my experience. AFAIK, it has always written a lilo.conf.