Because it's main functionallity is to *create* grub config files ;)

I quote from a man page

"update-grub is a program used to generate the menu.lst file used by the grub bootloader. It works by looking in /boot for all files which start with "vmlinuz-". They will be treated as kernels, and grub menu entries will be created for each. It will also create the initial menu.lst if none exists, after prompting the user. It will also add initrd lines for ramdisk images found with the same version as kernels found. e.g. /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.5 and /boot/initrd-2.4.5 will cause a line of "initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.5 or simliar to be added for the kernel entry in the menu.lst."

You do not have php installed on your system hence providing you the file in plain text (without interpreting the php code).

Install php and related things (as well as make sure it's enable in apache)

Regards

Do the changes in the files and reboot.

It's as simple as that :)

Regards

I'd say that installing experimental drivers have its downsides, don't you think? ;)

I'm sorry I can't help you with this :S

1- Could you please define difficult? Besides, what "kind" of linux? desktop?server? average Joe linux?
2- I like learning it as well as I work on it :)
3- I took some classes at college but they were *HORRIBLE* and didn't teach me anything at all ( I don't think Spain has the best universities at this kind of teaching)
4- I did buy some books, although with internet you could find almost anything you need.
5- Old computers, cloud computing, virtual machines... (I'd love to have more money to test further things though)
6- I haven't taken any test/certification yet but I'm planning to :)

That server contains no repository for Ubuntu Lucid any longer, that's why you get the error.

By the way, it's generally not a good idea to mix repositories of different versions of your OS (you have ubuntu 11.10 and this repo was for 10.04!)