I’ve been informed that the support team is handling this issue.
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In the absence of a response from Support, let me elaborate on a few points … but I did concede originally
how the heck a user knows where to put GRUB
That is, the software is asking the user a question that it cannot reasonably expect a user without a detailed knowledge of things to answer.
Not actually. It is just telling you that that partition is mounted on /boot. That’s just the name of the mount point (name of the directory). It is not in fact indicating what is the boot drive.
Because it is a partition, the software’s recommendation of “not recommended” disagrees with Frankly’s advice. You can tell that it is a partition (in this case) because the device name ends with p and a digit. So /dev/nvme0n1p2 is just the second partition on the real drive /dev/nvme0n1 and there is also a first partition but it is not listed.
The bottom line for updating GRUB is: it only applies to real disks that are bootable - and you only have one disk (right? I don’t think the Librem 11 even supports a second disk), so you only need to update that one disk. (The exact definition of “real” can sometimes get complicated e.g. with a hardware RAID controller but that doesn’t apply here.)
So my guess for the Librem 11 is … it only has one disk and you should only update GRUB on that one disk.
You didn’t answer my question though as to whether you are using disk encryption (LUKS).
Another generic answer is: if you have a computer whose BIOS allows you to bring up a boot disk menu then the menu will show you the real disks that you have. The number of real disks that you have gives an indication of how many disks you should be updating GRUB on (if they are bootable disks).
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Thanks for your help Irvine & Frankly & JCS! Your suggestion (Irvine) was the correct one as confirmed by Support. In response to your question, yes I believe that my L11 came with disk encryption (LUKS) that I use my password upon startup to unlock. I will post below the majority of what Support told me in case anyone else has this issue in the future. (Hopefully, it is okay to post their response, if not, please delete.)
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Updating manually from the terminal can, in some cases, display prompts that won’t appear when updating from the software center. You can suppress these in the future with DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive, e.g. sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt full-upgrade.
From the list of GRUB install devices, the correct device would be /dev/nvme0n1. However, installing GRUB is not essential for your Librem 11 to function correctly. All Librem 11s are shipped with PureBoot pre-installed and PureBoot bypasses GRUB, so it can boot the Librem 11 even if GRUB was not installed.
If you continued past this prompt and would like to re-run it to ensure GRUB was installed correctly, you can use sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc. Again, this is not essential for your Librem 11 to boot correctly.
– Purism Support
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