Grub not installing when Xubuntu installs

[Liam Proven]

On 14 June 2012 16:53, Bill Stanley <bstanle at wowway.com> wrote:
>
> since I don't know his history on this mailing list, I do not know how
> reliable his advice is.

He's new, young and enthusiastic, but he has a habit of making claims
that are not true - such as "I'm on the Unity development team", when
actually, he's just a member of the mailing list. He has yet to learn
a lot of stuff, including not volunteering information that one does
not know to be correct.

>   Maybe the moderators can look up the history of his
> replies.  It is interesting to note all the ad-hominun  references to me
> being a newbie.  I can assure you, I have been using Linux on and off since
> 1998.  If anybody out there (even Linus himself) says he knows all there is
> about Linux, he is a liar.  When I run into something that has never
> happened before I ask for other opinions to see if there is something going
> wrong.  It does turn out that the default of sdb as the location for Grub is
> just such an example.

No, that's fair enough, and it was a reasonable question. If you will
forgive me making the observation, your occasionally erratic
spelling/capitalisation and so on (e.g. "ad hominun" for "ad hominem",
or Grub for GRUB, or starting your reply with a small "s") could give
someone the impression that you were rather young and inexperienced
yourself, and it's tricky to strike a balance between clear simple
advice for a young rookie - like "try such-and-such a recovery disk" -
and straightforward high-level diagnostic steps for an expert - like
"OK, boot off your live CD, but edit the kernel boot parms to leave
the initrd but point to your installed system as the root FS". The
latter would have worked fine and enabled you to boot your system and
then reinstall GRUB by hand, but only if you already know what boot
parameters are, how to edit them, what your root filesystem is and
what the device number of it is and so on.

I suspected from your posts that you would not have understood
something like this. Partly, because if you knew how to do that, you
probably wouldn't have asked in the first place. Was I wrong? If so, I
apologise unreservedly.

You might well respond, "well, why not just spell out these steps in
ways that a non-expert would understand." That is understandable, but
the thing is, doing that takes a lot of time and effort, irritates
those who don't need it spelled out and is very confusing and
difficult for those who /do/ need it spelled out. For them, there are
shorter, easier ways, such as using a GRUB recovery CD.

> Maybe the moderators should watch the replies for the quality of the reply.
>  Maybe a rating system to let the users know about the quality of another
> users responses.

That would be handy, but as this is a mailing list and not a web
forum, it doesn't really support stuff like that.

> There is such a thing as Internet trolls and inaccurate
> replies from them can cause a lot of grief if you follow their advice.

Absolutely.

>  Also, applying labels to another user is not good because this is supposed
> to be a place to go to for advice and not to be called names or given bad
> advice.

You're right, that's true and I am as guilty as anyone of occasionally
getting carried away and saying things I should not.

> If you suspect there is a troll out there just "don't feed the trolls".
> It's time for me to get off my soapbox now and just try to learn about Linux
> in peace!

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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