no longer possible to select GRUB Legacy by preseeding

Bug #857548 reported by Colin Watson
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
grub-installer (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
High
Colin Watson
Natty
Fix Released
High
Colin Watson
Oneiric
Fix Released
High
Colin Watson

Bug Description

Some systems still require the use of GRUB Legacy; a notable one is Xen guests where the host is using PV-GRUB configured to read from /boot/grub/menu.lst, a not uncommon hosting company setup. It used to be possible to force the installer to do this by preseeding grub-installer/grub2_instead_of_grub_legacy=false, and this was supported up to grub-installer 1.59. Unfortunately, in 1.60, Debian stopped the warning message attached to that debconf template from being displayed even in expert mode, but forgot to preserve the ability to preseed that template.

I fixed this in grub-installer 1.68 in Debian unstable, and have proposed a suitable patch for Debian squeeze (http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/09/msg00394.html). I intend to merge this into Oneiric. Natty is also affected, so I will upload a suitable patch there as well.

As usual for installer changes, testing this fix before it reaches natty-updates will require using the boot parameter apt-setup/proposed=true.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

This depends on bug 720558.

Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Natty):
status: New → Triaged
Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Oneiric):
status: New → Triaged
Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Natty):
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Oneiric):
importance: Undecided → High
Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Natty):
assignee: nobody → Colin Watson (cjwatson)
Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Oneiric):
assignee: nobody → Colin Watson (cjwatson)
milestone: none → ubuntu-11.10
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

Patch for Natty: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~cjwatson/grub-installer/natty-proposed/revision/1203

Development branch: Fixed in grub-installer 1.68ubuntu1 / 1.68ubuntu2, currently awaiting approval.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :
Download full text (3.2 KiB)

grub-installer (1.68ubuntu1) oneiric; urgency=low

  * Resynchronise with Debian (preseeding change in 1.68 fixes LP: #857548).
    Remaining changes:
    - Show the grub menu and raise the menu timeout if other operating
      systems are installed (only for GRUB Legacy right now).
    - Remove splash boot parameter unless debian-installer/framebuffer=true
      and debian-installer/splash=true.
    - If / or /boot are on a removable device, install GRUB there by
      default.
    - Only mount /target/proc if it isn't already mounted.
    - Support setting OVERRIDE_UNSUPPORTED_OS in the environment to force
      grub-installer to use its default MBR selection method despite there
      being unsupported operating systems on the disk.
    - Support grub-installer/bootdev_directory preseeding to make use of the
      relative path feature of grub4dos, so that we can point grub4dos at
      part of a disk for Wubi. Setting this disables normal grub
      installation, but still generates a device.map (for GRUB Legacy only);
      it also hides the menu.
    - Handle cases where /boot is bind-mounted.
    - Add support for writing an GRUB Legacy MBR on each disk in an
      mdadm-managed RAID providing /boot. (GRUB 2 can handle this already.)
    - Properly make use of output from os-prober to configure the booting of
      other operating systems on dmraid arrays. Attempt to guess where in
      the device map the array belongs, by substituting the first drive in
      the dmraid array for the dmraid array device node itself, and removing
      any reference to other member disks of the array.
    - Go back to using update-grub -y for GRUB Legacy for now; our grub
      package is a bit old and still requires this.
    - Default to grub2 for GPT systems.
    - Allow grub/grub2 choice for ext4, though still default to grub2.
    - If /boot is on an MD device and we're using GRUB 2, install GRUB there
      rather than (hd0); GRUB 2 will interpret that as meaning that it needs
      to install to each of the RAID members.
    - If using GRUB 2 and installing to a RAID device any of whose
      components are partitions, then default to installing to the MBRs of
      each of the containing disks, since GRUB 2 will refuse to install to
      the partition devices.
    - On i386/efi and amd64/efi subarchitectures, install grub-efi and purge
      grub, grub-legacy, and grub-pc; elsewhere, purge grub-efi*.
    - Add a preseedable grub-installer/timeout template to adjust the
      initial GRUB timeout.
    - Install GRUB to the SATA RAID or multipath device when /boot is on
      such a device, rather than installing to the first hard disk.
    - Remove grub-gfxpayload-lists in situations where we need to remove
      grub-pc.
    - Remove 'quiet' from target system command line if
      debian-installer/quiet is set to false.
    - When /boot is on a loopback device (i.e. Wubi), install GRUB there.
  * Simplify /proc and /sys mounting; make sure they're consistently mounted
    for the entire life of grub-installer, and consistently unmounted on
    exit (LP: #851704).

 -- Colin Watson <cjwats...

Read more...

Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Oneiric):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

grub-installer (1.68) unstable; urgency=low

  [ Matt Kraai ]
  * Write boot.cfg to /boot if using a separate /boot partition (closes:
    #637792).

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Restore the ability to choose to install GRUB Legacy by preseeding
    (grub-installer/grub2_instead_of_grub_legacy=false), removed in 1.60 as
    a side-effect of removing a warning message. This is still useful e.g.
    when installing inside Xen.

  [ Updated translations ]
  * Belarusian (be.po) by Viktar Siarheichyk
  * Bulgarian (bg.po) by Damyan Ivanov
  * Bosnian (bs.po) by Armin Besirovic
  * German (de.po) by Holger Wansing
  * Esperanto (eo.po) by Felipe Castro
  * Spanish (es.po) by Javier Fernández-Sanguino
  * Hindi (hi.po) by Kumar Appaiah
  * Italian (it.po) by Milo Casagrande
  * Japanese (ja.po) by Kenshi Muto
  * Korean (ko.po) by Changwoo Ryu
  * Dutch (nl.po) by Jeroen Schot
  * Panjabi (pa.po) by A S Alam
  * Polish (pl.po) by Marcin Owsiany
  * Portuguese (pt.po) by Miguel Figueiredo
  * Romanian (ro.po) by Ioan Eugen Stan
  * Russian (ru.po) by Yuri Kozlov
  * Sinhala (si.po) by Danishka Navin
  * Tamil (ta.po) by Dr.T.Vasudevan
  * Thai (th.po) by Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
  * Turkish (tr.po) by Mert Dirik
  * Ukrainian (uk.po) by Borys Yanovych
  * Simplified Chinese (zh_CN.po) by YunQiang Su

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:19:09 +0100

Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote : Please test proposed package

Hello Colin, or anyone else affected,

Accepted grub-installer into natty-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Natty):
status: Triaged → Fix Committed
tags: added: verification-needed
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

I've tested the following on Natty:

 * Xen installation with grub-installer/grub2_instead_of_grub_legacy=false apt-setup/proposed=true
 * Non-Xen installation with grub-installer/grub2_instead_of_grub_legacy=false apt-setup/proposed=true
 * Non-Xen installation with apt-setup/proposed=true

All three tests behaved as expected. Marking as verified.

tags: added: verification-done
removed: verification-needed
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package grub-installer - 1.60ubuntu4

---------------
grub-installer (1.60ubuntu4) natty-proposed; urgency=low

  * Restore the ability to choose to install GRUB Legacy by preseeding
    (grub-installer/grub2_instead_of_grub_legacy=false), removed in 1.60 as
    a side-effect of removing a warning message. This is still useful e.g.
    when installing inside Xen (LP: #857548).
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:47:03 +0100

Changed in grub-installer (Ubuntu Natty):
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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