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Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 501  

Devuan6 live XFCE install

It appears that Devuan6 live XFCE will not set up uefi booting, but it seems OK with MBR.

(I ran checksums OK)

Anyone else noticed this?

Last edited by Camtaf (Yesterday 14:21:54)

stultumanto

Member

Registered: 2023-12-12

Posts: 112  

Re: Devuan6 live XFCE install

The install media might not have booted in UEFI mode. I've had this problem a few times. If you know how to access a shell prompt from the installer, you can run the command findmnt | grep efivars, You should see a line starting with /sys/firmware/efi/efivars. This is required to properly install grub-efi. If you don't see the line, then your system booted in legacy mode, and you can't install to EFI.

If the system didn't boot in UEFI mode, you may need to adjust your BIOS settings. Some systems have a legacy boot "fallback" option. I've had systems where the installer booted in legacy mode if legacy fallback was enabled, so I had to force UEFI boot only. I've also had issues with some USB media creation programs. The last time I used Rufus, it did not create EFI boot disks by default. I had to manually select the option from a drop-down menu.

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,762  

Re: Devuan6 live XFCE install

Stultumanto beat me to it. Someone in IRC mentioned the same problem, so I just did a uefi install in qemu, and sure enough, I screwed up the first time and didn't boot uefi. When I did it right, the install worked and it installed grub. I still had to go through the uefi shell in qemu to get to the boot file, but it did boot. On a real hardware boot, there's probably a key to press that will show you a boot device menu, listing all the hard drives and usb or cdroms that are present. There might be two entries for the usb - one for legacy and one for uefi.

As mentioned, check to see that /sys/firmware/efi exists when you boot the live. There are other ways, to tell.

Note the color of the grub boot menu background. If it's blue, you booted in legacy bios mode. And it's a syslinux/isolinux boot menu, which looks different from a grub boot menu. When you boot the desktop-live in uefi mode, you get a black background at the boot menu.

Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 501  

Re: Devuan6 live XFCE install

Thanks for the replies.

I actually installed 2 laptops that were previously UEFI, as MBR installs, & just thought it was weird that it didn't install the grub boot loader on them when I tried installing to them - I'm happy enough to run them as MBR.

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,762  

Re: Devuan6 live XFCE install

Update (in case anyone else runs into this):  The other person who had trouble used Ventoy to prepare the usb, and apparently, it chose to use the syslinux bootloader in the iso rather than the grub bootloader, even though that computer only does uefi.