I recently installed mint which replaced my grub 1.99 with grub 2.02. I had to reinstall debian (for other reasons unrelated to this) and it gave me back 1.99, but I wanted to upgrade to 2.02. So is there anyway to do this through debian?

I have checked through the wiki, the packages.debian.org pages, and nothing about getting grub 2.0 on wheezy. I know I could probably just install from source, but I was hoping there was a way to get it set up through the apt repos.

grub 1.99 is "grub 2"

Is there any reason why you need a newer version of grub 2, is the version in stable not working?

If you have some newer kind of hardware/bios and are having trouble, then you could looking into backporting a newer release from testing/unstable.

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I understand 1.99 is grub2 but there is a newer version (2.02) available for not only Linux Mint 17, but debian jessie. To answer your questions directly, no compatibility or stability issues at all. I was just trying to find some help with backporting the jessie package to wheezy just because I want to be using the latest version of that particular piece of software...

Check backports. If a newer version of Grub is there (very unlikely) install it. Otherwise installing it correctly would be much more trouble than it would be worth. The boot-loader only needs to work. So it is not something that needs to be upgraded.

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So there is no issues with 1.99, you just want to have a newer version.....purely so you can have the newer version?

Rather pointless at best, and if thats the metric by which you measure sodftware, what the heck you are doing with debian 'stable'?

BTW, jessie currently has 2.00-22, not 2.02. Sid has 2.02~beta2-10.....

https://packages.debian.org/search?s...keywords=grub2

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Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04 which is "loosely" based on Debian Sid. However Ubuntu often grabs newer upstream versions of software and creates their own source and deb packages of them. Debian does have Grub 2.00.22 in Jessie and Grub 2.02 beta in Sid. If you want these you will have to enable either Jessie or Sid in your sources.list and then upgrade those packages. After you have done this comment out the jessie and/or sid lines so you don't inadvertently upgrade your entire system. I won't guarantee the outcome so you do this at your own risk.

Is mint still bootable?
If so boot to mint & reinstall grub there & you'll have what you want without bothering the debian system.

It is. Just for the sake of learning how to do it though, I fired up my debian install (currently just a tty, no xsession installed yet) and decided to try and reinstall from a chroot environment.

When I tried doing this, it seems to only have made entries in the new grub.cfg for Mint 17, no debian. Furthermore, Mint 17 is using kernel 3.13, but it entered in the grub.cfg as using 3.2 which is what debian is using. So I'm guessing that somewhere something got screwed up but I'm not sure where.

As k3lt01 said, just enable the jessie or sid repo. Install using the --no-install-recommends option in apt-get in case you could drag in additional packages from the unstable repos.

It is not recommended to add packages from testing, Sid or experimental in Debian Stable for very good reasons.

Some packages pretty much stand alone however and if they are stable that is fine. Grub 2.00 I know is stable. Have not use 2.02 because the box with my testing and Sid installs died before that was in Sid. Probably fine.

Important to remember that Ubuntu and Debian have very different ideas of what is "stable". Wheezy is Debian Stable.

If you really want the latest and greatest using Debian you really should go to either Debian testing (Jessie currently) or Debian unstable (always Sid). Damned lot of package upgrades in both, keep up with them and install the package apt-listbugs. Read all release notes that show up. Read all reported bugs that apt-listbugs comes up with. Watch carefully any packages being removed. Make sure you keep the old packages in cache in case you need to down grade a package.

They both actually are pretty reliable. They are not called testing and unstable for the fun of it though. They can bite you in the butt.

Once I can afford to build a new box I will be running Debian testing with an install of Debian Sid as my backup OS again. I usually have a Stable install on some other drive just for a "spare tire". Had to run Squeeze for a whole week one time during the Wheezy-testing cycle because of not paying attention to upgrades close enough.

Running them the Debian team doesn't discourage use of packages from repos more unstable than what you are using. They are their to build the next Debian Stable and you can do as you please with them with no one frowning at you on forums.

I have been running Wheezy for a couple solid months now. Boring as hell. Damned reliable.

If I wanted to have grub2.02 and practice installing from the unstable repo I would leave Wheezy alone, ditch LM, install Jessie and install grub2.02 from unstable.

You want something from the LM people install LMDE. Ubuntu is not a reliable source for a respin.

I have both Debian Wheezy and Debian Jessie installed. Wheezy installs grub 1.99 + 27 which is actually grub2. Jessie installs grub2 but I don't know what the minor version number is. Wheezy is installed on /dev/sda1. Jessie is installed on /dev/sdb1. On Wheezy I issued grub-install /dev/sda. On Jessie I issued grub-install /dev/sdb. Both grub menus list both Wheezy and Jessie as bootable operating systems.

I set up my grub configuration to be bootable even if /dev/sda has a catastrophic failure. I can use the BIOS to move /dev/sdb to be the first bootable drive and then boot into Debian Jessie to do my repair work.

You could set up two Debian systems like I have and then use grub-install to place grub2 on your boot drive. If you wanted the very latest grub version you could set up Debian unstable on a spare partition and install its version of grub2 on your boot drive.

------------------------
Steve Stites

Anyone interested in what grub version is installed on their system can run;
This must be run as root.

Thanks for all the great advice!

LMDE was definitely what I have been considering as a backup OS, something to have there just incase something goes wrong. If I install LMDE, and swap the sources and apt-preferences to wheezy so as to have a more stable system, would there be any problems with that do you think? I've done a similar thing with crunchbang and it worked well enough, mostly because #! is built on wheezy I think, but I don't know how it'd work with a deb based system built on jessie.

If you go for LMDE do not set your sources.list to wheezy the fussing about to get a "stable system" just isn't worth it. Set it to jessie instead and leave it pointing to Jessie because Jessie will be going into freeze this November, you will then get 6 months of freeze and bug fixing followed by 2 years of stable and then possibly another few years of LTS (Security support) if Debian continues LTS after the Squeeze experiment.

Having said all that I really believe you may a well just run Debian and be done with it.

LMDE has a kind of strange package system using their own repos.

They try to take "snapshots" of stable periods in the Debian testing repo and then put out what they refer to as Update Packs. These are widely spaced. Months. Are more similar to the release cycle of "regular" releases in Ubuntu.

There are few or no package upgrades in between.

This bothers some folks but it seems to work well enough. They have had one Update Pack, however, that broke the system pretty completely and had to warn people against using it and removed it and one set of install images completely.

This leads people to think of changing the repos to Debian testing. I personally would not do that.

LMDE is an interesting project that I think will get better and better as time goes by. To do that they need people to run the system as set up.

If you are looking for a stable backup I would stick with Wheezy. Changing the LMDE repos to point at Wheezy is the same as downgrading any system. Hard to do this in a really sucessful way.

All you would get, if you actually got it downgraded and working, is Wheezy with LMDE artwork and sudo configured. You don't need sudo and the artwork is out there for the picking.

Jessie, the last time I was running it, was in pretty good shape although I found Sid to be slightly more stable at that time. That was a couple months ago when my tower died. Have no personal knowlege of what either is like currently.