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I'm using the refind bootloader and never, ever want to use grub. Now and then, Ubuntu Xenial automatically pulls it in and I get a prompt about where to install the grub bootloader.[1] I explicitly don't want grub potentially mucking up my setup.

  • how can I find out why grub is being summoned?
  • how can I prevent it from ever being installed again?

[1] By 'it', I mean grub-common, grub-gfxpayload-lists, grub-pc, grub-pc-bin, grub2-common.

Hendy
  • 256
  • I presume there is a new version of grub and Ubuntu updates it. If so probably pinning grub at the current version will solve it. – WinEunuuchs2Unix Oct 02 '18 at 02:22
  • @WinEunuuchs2Unix nope, no grub-* is installed, then it's newly installed. See my answer for why (it's pulled in as recommended by the kernel image package). Pinning to -1 has fixed it, but there were several blacklisting options along the way and I tried 3; only pinning worked, which still perplexes me. – Hendy Oct 03 '18 at 03:21

1 Answers1

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Edit2 2018-10-01: got it. tl;dr is that apt-mark hold grub-foo (on all desired packages) was the ticket, but appears to have required manually calling on each package apt dist-upgrade was attempting to bring in. 

$ sudo apt-mark hold grub*
grub2 set on hold.
grub set on hold.
grub-common set on hold.

[... a bunch more packages ...]

grub-pc set on hold.
grub-legacy-doc set on hold.
grub2-common set on hold.
grub-gfxpayload-lists set on hold.
grub-pc-bin set on hold.

But right after...

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gcc-6-base:i386 grub-common:i386 grub-gfxpayload-lists:i386 grub-pc:i386 grub-pc-bin:i386 grub2-common:i386 ...

Go figure. However, manually specifying the above grub* packages to apt-mark hold worked and apt dist-upgrade no longer pulls in grub.

Last comment is that I tried this in /etc/apt/preferences.d/grub-blacklist:

Package: grub*
Pin: origin ""
Pin-Priority: -1

That didn't work.

Edit 2018-10-01: this was not the solution... even with the setting in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove below, apt dist-upgrade is still putting it forward to be installed. To be continued...

I think I may have answered both questions.

how can I find out why grub is being summoned?

I'm most familiar with pacman on arch; looks like the equivalent to pacman -Qi pkg where you get a list of which packages require the named package. This was one equivalent of that for ubuntu:

$ apt-cache rdepends --installed grub-pc
|linux-image-4.15.0-34-generic
    grub-pc:i386

So, the meta-package for the linux kernel pulls it in. If I had more time/inclination, I'd see if there was some set of packages to install directly vs. relying on this convenience package, but I don't care to do that at this time.

how can I prevent it from ever being installed again?

In looking for how to blacklist in ubuntu, there were various options, but I settled on this one because it seemed the least weird/hokey:

$ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove
{
  ...
  Never-MarkAuto-Sections
  {
    ...
    "grub*";
  };
};
Hendy
  • 256