apt wants to remove grub2 for machines that did upgrade legacy grub

[stop]

Binary package hint: apt

I upgraded some machines from jaunty to karmic. After grub2 chainload went successful I ran upgrade-from-grub-legacy. grub-pc 1.97~beta3-1ubuntu7 is then (or at some later time) used.
Now for every machine that has followed the scenario above, apt-get dist-upgrade now reports it wants to remove grub-pc, while fresh karmic installs don't report this.

So I reckon upgraders (from jaunty to karmic) that will install grub2 will encounter this problem, doesn't seem like apt is waiting for something cause grub-common is on the list for stuff to be upgraded.

A workaround for me was to remove (the old) grub (grub 1 that is) from the machines.... This removed grub-pc from the list of items to be removed and added grub-pc 1.97~beta3-1ubuntu8 to the list of items to be upgraded, in dist-upgrade.

I was under the assumption that upgrade-from-grub-legacy would remove grub1, but it doesn't seem to do that. So now it seems the installation of grub1 makes upgrades impossible...

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Oct 7 19:15:58 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: apt 0.7.23.1ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-12.40-generic
SourcePackage: apt
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-12-generic x86_64

[stop (whoopwhoop)]

I ran dist-upgrade (without removing grub1) from a test-machine: grub2 gets removed and it looks like it's falling back to grub1. grub2 is not installed according to synaptic and it(grub1 ?) is skipping the menu list at start-up.

[Claus Toft (claus-toft)]

I can also confirm this.

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

Not sure if this is helpful but I did some playing and I wonder if this has something to do with how grub-pc interacts with startupmanager. When I try to install startupmanager on a machine with grub-pc:

lance@lance-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install startupmanager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  grub
Suggested packages:
  grub-doc mdadm
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  grub-pc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  grub startupmanager
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/525kB of archives.
After this operation, 201kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

Of course I don't know if all the machines effected had startupmanager installed or not. Just a thought.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Ubuntu upgrades are to be made with the do-release-upgrade script. Doing a dist-upgrade is never, ever supported.