Installing Ubuntu without GRUB

[blind Pete]

Glenn / Lenny wrote:

> Hi Again,
> I have been researching this concern, and it seems to me that I came up
> with an idea that might work. I just don't recall the installation steps
> to know for sure if I will get my option to do this step. I suspect that
> my Windows partition is going to be /dev/sda1 and the empty partition will
> be /dev/sda2. Do we get the option of which partition to put GRUB onto? 

Yes.  Sensible choices are the MBR (which is not a partition at all) 
or the root partition of your linux installation.  Remember that you 
*NEED* some method to tell the boot process to jump to that partition, 
which you will have to organize yourself - Ubuntu won't do it for you.  
And the Grub people are strongly opposed to installing Grub to a 
partition because the housekeeping processes of some filing systems 
"fix" things in undesirable ways.  There are ways to make it work, 
if you want to.  

> If
> so, I suspect that if I can put GRUB onto the Linux partition, that I will
> only be presented with GRUB when I down arrow to the second partition that
> my BIOS offers, and having GRUB there is no big deal. Any thoughts? Glenn

Are you using BIOS?  Or UEFI in legacy mode?  Or UEFI as UEFI?  

If you are using BIOS then LiLo works well, but is no longer 
maintained.  If you are using UEFI then rEFInd works well.  
These can be used instead of or as well as Grub, depending on 
taste.  What does your firmware offer you, a list of disks, 
or partitions, or bootable targets?  

-- 
blind Pete
Sig goes here...