Bootloader troubles
After putting my mini-ITX system in an usable (although not fully assembled) state, I installed Ubuntu, gave it a quick glance and went for Debian. Ubuntu is just too bloated for my taste.
Anyhow, I downloaded the debian-installer rc2 netinst iso and started the installation using the 2.6 install-kernel. Everything went as expected until bootloader installation: neither grub nor lilo wanted to install themselves.
With Ubuntu I just killed the hanging ‘grub-install’ process, finished the installation and it turned out that grub has been installed despite the ‘unfinished’ installation.
Debian, notorious ‘old-school’, prefered lilo. Although lilo gave me an error it was installed anyway. At least it installed itself. I rebooted, finished the installation, upgraded the kernel and wondered why dpkg didn’t tell me about ‘updating lilo’. Turned out that the lilo-package wasn’t installed.
I guess this is what happened: the installer suceeded in installing lilo into the MBR, failed to recognize its success and therefore didn’t install the package for it assumes it to be useless. Very nice.
But no problem, I installed grub which I prefer anyway. But ‘grub-install’ didn’t make any approaches to finish it’s task soon and refused beeing quited or killed. I rebooted my machine (assuming to see the same behaviour as mentioned above with Ubuntu) but lilo was still there, and for not having been updated, gave me a screen full of nice ’99 99 [..]‘. It took me over an hour to get this fixed using Knoppix, repeating the same (and as it turned out) correct procedure to install grub over and over again.
I can’t remember to have ever experienced such an erratic behaviour when using Linux. Maybe I should have considered the warnings about using XFS on the boot partiton but then again, my other box is running it as well..