Skip bootloader installation when installing LM

[xenopeek]

Hey everyone,

I have a lightweight Arch installed on my system, which boots using grub. My partition layout is the following:
/dev/sda1 -> /boot
/dev/sda2 ->boot backup
/dev/sda3 -> LVM system, where I have swap, and LVs for Arch and Mint.

My /boot is to be shared by all the distros, by keeping the various kernels and initramfs files in seperate folders (i.e. /boot/arch, /boot/mint). Since it's pretty much easier to configurate and tweak, I'd like to keep using GRUB instead of GRUB 2. Well, to my surprise, the current Linux Mint (the KDE version, at least), does not feature an option to skip the bootloader installation. I tried a work around, which was to point the bootloader to my swap partition, which made the install process go smoothly until the point of installing the bootloader, when it promptly crashed. Figuring it might've been near the end of the install, I chrooted into /target, installed lvm2, adjusted grub/menu.lst, and tried rebooting. To my surprise, everything worked as intended, Mint booted up pretty much perfectly.

But still, I'd like this to be in future versions of the (KDE) installer, it shouldn't be that hard. In fact, I'll have a look at the install script later tonight and see if I can fix it myself.

Cheers

[xenopeek]

Moved here by moderator

Yours seems to be a very specific use-case. I think you can agree most users will want a boot loader installed Perhaps this can be added as a command line option to the installer; it should not be present in the GUI to confuse average users I think.

[Blackened Justice]

Hmm, it doesn't really seem to be such a user-specific case. Pretty much every other linux distro I've tried (and that includes Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch, Chakra and many others) seem to offer such an option. The average user wouldn't really know whether to install a bootloader to /dev/sda or /dev/sda1, by that logic that option should be removed too...

Any way, if the only reasonable option is to have it as a command line option, then that would be good enough to me Maybe you could have lvm also installed with a command line option, that would be even greater


Cheers

[Blackened Justice]

Well, yesterday I realized that there IS a commandline option to skip bootloader installation, just start "ubiquity -b kde-session", and no bootloader will be installed

Cheers