on "broken" OS installers ... well on the software that the OS installers depend upon ...

Working out issues with the installation of an OS onto a CF device. Odd situation. OS installs all the way. Upon reboot, whammo, not enough grub to do more than print a message saying something to the effect of “you are hosed”. This is OpenSuSE 10.3 for a JackRabbit flying out the door tuesday morning. Earlier if possible.

Turns out that this wasn’t confined to SuSE. A number of the other distros did the same thing. As near as I can tell, they write out the boot loader last, wait a second or two and then reboot. This doesn’t work so well for CF boot drives. Really. So the trick is to reboot them with something like Ubuntu 7.04 (had it handy) desktop, run it as a live CD, mount the devices, and then rerun grub-install. To say that was annoying is a gross understatement. Well, the SuSE installer tries to be smart, though I wish it were smarter in dealing with CF devices. Sadly this isn’t even SuSE’s fault, as they depend upon grub. You know grub-legacy. Because grub2 isn’t quite ready for prime time, and grub-legacy isn’t being actively maintained. Call that the down-side of the open source universe. The OS installer might or might not be broken, but it depends upon code which is, IMO, often … er … highly problematic … doing what it wants, not what you want … and it isn’t often right about it either … So, ok, the SuSE installer is not broken.