UbuntuBSD First Contact

I downloaded the ubuntuBSD-15.10~BETA5-amd64.iso from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntubsd/ because I thought it sounded like a great idea. Two major selling points were the lack of systemd, which I actively dislike, and the ability to use ZFS - a filesystem I've wanted access to for years (I could have booted up a BSD, but this appeals more as I get a system I'm more familiar with). A lot of noise has been made about how it may not be legal to ship ZFS with a Linux kernel because of license incompatibilities, but ... they're shipping it, let's give it a try!

I put the ISO on a couple reasonably powered machines, one with Ubuntu 15.10 and one with Debian jessie, both with VirtualBox installed. VirtualBox has proven fairly reliable, and most things install just fine. Without at least seeing what UbuntuBSD looks like, I'm not eager to test it on real hardware. But UbuntuBSD fails before it even gets to GRUB: a message appears on screen for about three seconds saying "error: failed in building a Huffman code table", and then you're dumped to a grub> prompt. Where, I admit, I'm somewhat lost. This happens on both machines. And that phrase about a "Huffman code table" sounds like a great thing to search on Google ... but it comes up completely empty.

So I haven't seen UbuntuBSD yet. And I have no solution for you: but if you've figured this out, please let me know. Or even if you haven't figured it out, at least you'll know you're not alone.

2016-05-01 Update: re-downloaded the ISO, it's working this time.