The real shame is that windows never had the compose key. But all these layouts come from mechanical typewriters, anyway.

You don’t need a desktop for a server. A local TTY allows the same stuff as connecting over SSH but you can do whatever you need to bring up the network. The drawback is having to go to the data centre…

What does /proc/partitions say?

Also, if you plan to use that 256MB partition for /boot, make it bigger. I go for 1G lately.