Hi,

On 6/12/21 13:02, Maurice McCarthy via Dng wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am a new user. I installed Devuan 4.0.0 on sdc of my old amd64 PC
> from the live image which I had dd-ed to a usb stick. The installation
> seemed to go flawlessly but the first boot failed to find grub (or so
> it seemed to me.)
>
> I ran the live image again and followed advice on the Debian wiki
> https://wiki.debian.org/GrubEFIReinstall
>
> /sys/firmware/efi/efivars was populated
>
> so I reinstalled grub and all was well again.
>
> I attach a dmesg just in case it is of any interest.

I've been stuck on this issue for a while, and recently it became clear to me
that a similar problem almost always arises (in my particular case) when setting the
distributor ID in /usr/lib/os-release to a new value other than de(bi|vu)an. Say:

$ lsb_release -i
Distributor ID:    Gnuinos

What is happening here is that the ID is taken into account by grub-install and, as a
result, bootx64.efi is targeted at /boot/efi/EFI/gnuinos:

/boot/efi/EFI/$target/bootx64.efi => /boot/efi/EFI/gnuinos/bootx64.efi

whereas the bootloader always expects to find it at /boot/efi/EFI/debian, no matter the
value of this ID.

Furthermore, Devuan has ID=devuan in the base-files package without this affecting in
any way the target of bootx64.efi within the EFI directory:

https://git.devuan.org/devuan/base-files/src/branch/master/etc/os-release <https://git.devuan.org/devuan/base-files/src/branch/master/etc/os-release>

The outcome is that i've been compelled to turn back the distributor to its default
ID=devuan, and i'm rebuilding the images of gnuinos chimaera right now so that they will
work properly in UEFI mode without workarounds during the first boot on the part of users.

I wonder, to this regard, what is the trick in Devuan to put in place the distributor ID
without the need of hijacking the boot loader...

Cheers,

Aitor.