Thursday, September 16, 2010

Change the GRUB Menu Timeout on Ubuntu

When your Ubuntu system boots, you will see the GRUB menu if you hit the Esc key, or if you’ve enabled the menu to show by default.
The only issue with this is that the default timeout is only 3 seconds.
You may want to increase this amount… or you may even want to decrease
it. Either one is simple.


Open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your favorite text editor. I’m using gedit:


sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst



Now find the section that looks like this:


## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 3



The timeout value is in seconds. Save the file, and when you reboot
you will have that many seconds to choose the menu item you want.

show the GRUB menu by default on Ubuntu

When Ubuntu boots, you normally briefly see a screen that says “GRUB loading. please wait… Press Esc to enter the menu…”


If you are hacking around your system and would prefer to always see
the GRUB menu (to enter command-line options, for instance), there’s an
easy fix.


Open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your favorite text editor. I’m using gedit:


sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst



Now find the section that looks like this:


## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
hiddenmenu



Put a # before hiddenmenu to comment that line out:


## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
#hiddenmenu



Save the file, and you should see the menu the next time you reboot.


SOURCE: www.howtogeek.com

Adding windows XP to grub menu after intalling this OS AFTER Ubuntu

So your dual booting windows and you want windows to appear in the grub screen at startup. Here's how you do it:



As root:

# nano /boot/grub/menu.lst



Add the following lines in wherever you would like the entry to show up:



title MS Windows XP

root (hd0,0) [note below]
*
savedefault

makeactive

chainloader +1



*(hd0,0) means /dev/hda1

*(hd0,1) means /dev/hda2