Ubuntu – “apt-get install grub” wants to install packages although the GRUB bootmenu works

grub-legacygrub2package-management

Recently I made a fresh install of Ubuntu, and through some error, became very frustrated. Grub and 15.04 just don't seem to work well together. However, that is not exactly my question. I made the install finally, and when I booted, the grub menu obviously came up, but then when I got into my terminal to install some proprietary drivers, I did sudo apt-get install grub just to make sure everything was good. Instead of telling me that Grub was already installed it said 6 new packages would be installed. So here's the question. If the grub menu came up, and grub apparently wasn't installed, which side is wrong?

Best Answer

sudo apt-get install grub is a wrong command to run.

It installs legacy version of grub and removes grub-pc or grub-efi.

You can check /var/log/apt/history.log and revert these changes.

Related Solutions

Fix Grub Installation Failure: Stuck at Grub> Prompt

In my opinion, you try to install by selecting 'continue without a bootloader', when you finish, reboot your computer with a liveCD or LiveUSB again. after being on the desktop, try to reinstall grub with the steps:

mount ubuntu partition that you installed earlier. you can click on places > your-ubuntu-partition

open terminal, run:

sudo chroot /media/your-ubuntu-partition

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

sudo update-grub

close the terminal, and try to reboot it.

Ubuntu – Whats is the importance of Plymouth

What's wrong after uninstalling plymouth?

Removing Plymouth also removes the display manager, e.g. lightdm and/or gdm and a little bit more. Here is a snippet of the remove command on my system:

sudo apt-get remove --simulate plymouth
[…]
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  cryptsetup gdm lightdm mountall plymouth plymouth-label plymouth-theme-ubuntu-gnome-logo plymouth-theme-ubuntu-gnome-text plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-gnome-desktop unity unity-greeter unity-tweak-tool upstart
  upstart-bin
[…]

That's the reason, why you don't have a login screen anymore.

An advice to revert the mistake

You can always login on tty1 and reinstall lightdm/gdm and the other removed packages like ubuntu-desktop and upstart. An overview of the removed packages can you find in /var/log/dpkg.log. In my example I would have to reinstall

sudo apt-get install gdm lightdm ubuntu-desktop upstart ubuntu-gnome-desktop unity unity-tweak-tool

After that start your display manager, e.g.

sudo service gdm start

sudo systemctl start gdm

What is Plymouth?

Plymouth is an application that runs very early in the boot process (even before the root filesystem is mounted!) and provides a graphical boot animation while the boot process happens in the background.

_{Source: apt-cache show plymouth}

… and Plymouth replaces usplash.

Find more about Plymouth here.

Best Answer

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Fix Grub Installation Failure: Stuck at Grub> Prompt

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