You do not need a separate /boot
partition unless you have an LVM setup (used in dm-crypt setups).
Run ubiquity -b
to open the installer with the option of skipping grub installation (since we're using systemd-boot
).
When you get to the screen "Ubuntu has finished installation" choose Continue testing.
Open a Terminal.
Chroot into the new system.
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt # replace /dev/sda5 with wherever it is you installed Ubuntu
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi # this is where Ubuntu mounts the ESP
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
chroot /mnt
This will set systemd-boot
to be our default:
aj@aj-MacbookPro $ sudo -i
root@aj-MacBookPro:~# history
1 cd boot
2 ls
3 cd efi
4 ls
5 cat /etc/fstab # check entries
6 ls
7 cd ..
8 ls
9 cp abi-4.4.0-22-generic efi
10 cp config-4.4.0-22-generic efi
11 cp initrd.img-4.4.0-22-generic efi
12 cp System.map-4.4.0-22-generic efi
13 cp vmlinuz-4.4.0-22-generic efi
14 ls efi
15 cd efi
16 ls
17 bootctl --help
18 cd
19 cd /boot/efi
20 ls
21 mkdir -p loader/entries
22 ls
23 vi loader/loader.conf
24 vi loader/entries/ubuntu.conf
25 tree
26 apt install tree
27 tree
28 bootctl install --path=/boot/efi
29 efibootmgr
30 ls
31 cd /
32 ls
33 cd boo
34 cd boot
35 ls
36 ls -l
37 cp initrd.img-4.4.0-22-generic efi
38 tree efi
39 bootctl install --path=/boot/efi
40 cd efi
41 ls
42 ls EFI
43 ls EFI/systemd/
51 efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda1 -p 1 -l EFI/systemd/systemd-bootx64.efi -L "Linux Boot Manager"
52 efibootmgr -o 0000
53 ls
54 history
root@aj-MacBookPro:~#
@petar-andrejic Debian based systems refuse to install kernels (or any package for that matter) on FAT based filesystems. You do have to setup some way of copying the kernel images over to the ESP for systemd-boot to work. Personally rEFInd is the most flexible and powerful bootloader I've used but since I don't use Ubuntu these days I simply load the kernel image as an EFI binary (EFISTUB as mentioned on ArchWiki).