intrepid: grub-pc w/o kernel-helper makes /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot not working

[ibotty]

on a recent intrepid (31st of july 2008), when trying to remove an old kernel (say: 2.6.26.4) it complains, that /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot failed due to kernel-helper not existent.

kernel-helper is in package grub.

[Dyno (dyno-fu)]

just confirm this bug.

[Thomas Templin (coastgnu)]

+1 confirm this bug

All operations, adding, removing kernel images fail due to the missing kernel-helper script if grub2 is in use

An apt-file search kernel-helper says:
 grub: /usr/sbin/kernel-helper

So I copied a kernel-helper script from another machine and it works.

Solution is:
  Add the kernel helper script from the package grub to the package grub2.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Let's see if I can't do something about this. It'll probably require changes to the grub packaging, though; I don't think we want to ship kernel-helper in both the grub and grub2 packages.

[pkg (paul-gaynor)]

I have confirmed this as well. old kernels cannot be removed when you switch to grub2 because of the missing kernel-helper script

[kieran (daralantarial)]

move kernel-helper into grub-common, which is prereq for both grub and grub2/grub-pc

[Jordan (jordanu)]

grub-common is not a dependency of grub.

[Carey Underwood (cwillu)]

This hurts a lot more now that ext4 is being considered for prime-time, as grub2 has support for booting an ext4 partition directly, while grub requires a separate boot partition.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

grub in Ubuntu will boot from ext4 just fine.

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen (janneke)]

This has gotten worse. Kernels packages now cannot be removed anymore
when the kernel-helper script is missing. Should I file a bug with linux-image,
it seems that needs this script without "depend"ing on it?

[Nith (nith1210)]

Confirming this bug. I modified /etc/kernel/prerm.d/last-good-boot and simply commented out /usr/sbin/kernel-helper -i and was successfully able to remove a kernel. kernel-helper should be removed by grub when you uninstall it and some equivalent check should be installed by grub2. It really feels like grub2 is a symptom not the problem. Do people who switch from grub to lilo have this issue?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I think this is essentially bug 272885, fixed in Ubuntu 9.04; see my comments there. If you still have grub installed but are actually using grub-pc, then you might need to 'dpkg --purge grub' to make the problem go away.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(And kernel-helper no longer exists, so it's not worth making any other changes to grub2 at this point.)