My box just installed GRUB, is this normal?

Maintenance
1

I received one of the regular Status Checks Change Notice email and noticed the system had added the grub bootloader.

System – Added

grub-pc (2.02~beta2-9ubuntu1.12)
grub-pc-bin (2.02~beta2-9ubuntu1.12)
grub2-common (2.02~beta2-9ubuntu1.12)
grub-common (2.02~beta2-9ubuntu1.12)

I don’t know a great deal about GRUB but it seems strange to add a boot loader out of the blue. Particularly a beta release.

Is this normal and why do we need a pre-boot command line interface?

2

It was most likely an update to GRUB (GRUB is ubuntu’s default bootloader.)

3

It hasn’t actually installed the update. The email is telling you that an update is newly available. “Added” means it newly appears in the Status Checks in the admin site. I think the Status Checks in the admin site will tell you how to install the update.