So after a lot of distro test drives I settled on Ubuntu Budgie 19.10 until the next LTS release. You guys have really done a great job with this, really helping Ubuntu be a lot tastier in this flavor, and Budgie itself is really a lot nicer here than on Solus.
However, I have ran into an installation issue on the first machine that I cannot resolve. “Unable to install grub in /dev/sda”. This is an install that was intended as a dual boot with windows 10. I have tried numerous fixes and all of the fixes end in a road block and no solution.
Everything went fine with the install until the end, and then I got the message where grub failed to install. This seems to have happened to others as well. But it seems the fixes worked for them but not for me.
I am a very rusty heap right now when it comes to Linux. I haven’t messed with it in a long time. But I am not clueless either and this has me whipped. I can see that the partitions are there. I can see that the linux install is there. I can see that the EFI stuff is ok too. I can even use the laptop’s own boot menu and the OS is in the list. But of course when I try to just boot it that way I get the “gnu grub version 2.04 minimal bash-like editing is supported in grub” screen. I have tried to work through that path as well to no avail.
Really I’d be OK with being able to boot as expected, or by the laptop boot menu, or heck even if I could install and configure grub on a usb stick I could use to boot Ubuntu Budgie. Any ideas on how to get this working via any of these 3 methods???
At this point the only saving grace is that windows 10 still boots fine. Big butt saver since it is my daugther’s laptop for college and she just left to drive back with it. I just told her I’d try to figure it out and finish it up when she is home next.
The laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad with 1tb drive and 8gb of ram. The install media is booting EFI and that is confirmed. The installation method was via live usb, which I used the try option and then used the desktop icon to do the installation.
Installing grub manually doesn’t work. Using the boot repair tool doesn’t work, it just errors out at the end saying it boot repair requires a live session, but obviously I am in a live session. And the bash like editing doesn’t seem to work either. I am not that familiar with the newer grub2. But I think it doesn’t work because the grub stuff is not there to edit. I don’t know I have forgot a lot because I ended up pulling an all-nighter trying different fixes.
Next up is my HP laptop which is likely to go down the exact same path with the install. I’m not really ready to roll those dice though until I make some sense of what is going on with the first attempt on the Lenovo laptop.