Grub and Knoppix - wot tha' heck?

Just started playing with Knoppix once I realised that it makes a great front end and installer for Debian. Works great, everything runs, plan to replace my RH9 desktop with it once I put a few miles on it.

First problem, Knoppix defaults to Lilo. Don't understand why, but what the heck. Grub is easy to install...

I thought I had a fairly good understanding of Grub and have put it on Rh, Slackware, Gentoo and Winders. But with knoppix it wouldn't work. As far as I got was the grub prompt, although I could boot by manually specifying the kernel and options.

Hacked on it all afternoon, made about 10 dozen grub.conf files. Nothing would boot it automatically. Even reinstalled grub on an old Slackware box just to make sure that I still remembered how to do it. Slack booted fine.

Downloaded the latest Grub tarball, printed the manual, went through it line by line with no luck.

Then while surfing for some clue, found a Knoppix hit with an instruction I never heard of - 'update-grub' which is not in the official grub manual . It makes a /boot/grub/menu.lst instead of a /boot/grub/grub.conf and worked the first time.

Ok, question. Where did menu.lst come from? Is it Debian specific and why would they pull a Red Hat and start off in some tangent unstandard direction?

Or am I missing something?

Thanks
CptKrf

I notice menu.lst is mentioned in # info grub