Yes, not much of a post, but after many hours of trials and errors it appeared that Novell insisted corrupting the grub boot loader in an Ubuntu installaation, I had to switch to Lilo, not entirely trivial, and install grub away from the MBR to keep its functionality and chainload it, instead of trying to replicate all its contents in lilo. In unrelated news, the moviedb C language local interface to imdb.com keeps giving me grief on Linux with loads of segfaults, miraculously it compiled on OSX with the increased constants like MAXTITLES recommended in some BSD list. At least one of the trivial problems was that the Makefile will only ftp to get the data if a line looks like "-auto -user lala@blabla.com", which is stated ambiguously in the docs