Q I've tried building my own distro. I tried it in my HP DV9308nr laptop, added the BCM43xx firmware to the ISO image I was creating, burned it, booted from it, and everything worked as expected. How do I edit the menu.lst file under /boot/grub/ in the ISO image so that it adds the following entries to the kernel at boot time;
vga=791 pnpbios=off irqpoll nomsi nomce
This laptop will lock-up without these settings.
A Ubuntu doesn't use Grub for its CDs, it uses isolinux instead. The configuration file for this is isolinux/isolinux.cfg on the CD. The syntax of the file will be reasonably familiar to anyone who has used Lilo. When you have completed the second step of the instructions on page 45, you will have a copy of the CD's contents in the ubuntu-rebuild directory. Now edit ubuntu-rebuild/isolinux/isolinux.cfg and find the first menu entry, which looks like this for Ubuntu 7.10
LABEL live menu label ^Start or install Ubuntu kernel /casper/vmlinuz append file=/cdrom/preseed/ ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/ casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --
The append line contains the parameters that are passed to the kernel when booting, just like the append line in lilo.conf, so add your options to this line, before the final "--" and save the file. Now continue with the rest of the tutorial and your remastered disc will boot with the options you need. Any more problems? Let us know!