Ubuntu

Editing Grub Boot Loader

Asked by SirPuma

First I'm a long time Windows user and know just about nothing about Linux. I'm not a programmer so please bear with me.

My OS
Ubuntu 9.10 with the recent updates
Windows XP Professional SP3

Problem is boot order
As I recall I installed XP first then Ubuntu. Grub boot menu seemed to install fine and gave me two Ubuntu options followed by two Memtest options followed by Windows. After I did the Ubuntu updates I got two more Ubuntu options with newer version numbers. But when I try and boot from the newer versions Ubuntu crashes with an error message about a missing file. The older versions of Ubuntu seem to boot just fine. My system doesn't seem to have any file called menu.lst, instead it seems to get it's menu from grub.cfg. I used the sudo option to try and edit the grub.cfg but the changes didn't stay. At the top of the config file it says that it's auto generated. I tried creating a menu.lst but clearly didn't do it right as it didn't change the boot menu.

What I want to do
I want to edit the boot menu so that Windows is on top followed by the two working Ubuntu options and then the Memtest options. As my primary use for my system is Windows based, I want the system to default load to that OS. As it is if I power my system on and walk away it loads Ubuntu.

Questions
How do I permanently edit the boot menu when there is no menu.lst?

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Ian Ace (iaculallad) said : 		#1

Use startupmanager to edit your GRUB menu:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

For further reading:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/StartUpManager

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SirPuma (marobison68) said : 		#2

Ok, I will look into that. Thank you.

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SirPuma (marobison68) said : 		#3

The startup manager helped me with setting the default OS and the timeout, but it doesn't offer a way to remove the two extra Ubuntu OS options. I ran a "recovery" mode on the older option and that did something so now the two versions work, but load the same OS version. Any way to remove the unneeded version listings in the boot menu?

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Tim Tierney (timtierney) said : 		#4

Those two OS (if I understand you correctly) are not operating systems. They are multiple kernels installed on the machine. When new kernel revisions are issued by Ubuntu they will install as updates. Its good to have two kernels installed in case there is a problem with the new one.

In order to remove them you must use symatic.

Let me know if this helps?

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SirPuma (marobison68) said : 		#5

I do not know what symatic is, like I said, I'm totally new to Linux. I'm not a developer, so I don't really see a need for more than one kernel version. Though when I log into the two different "versions" there doesn't appear to be any difference in them. How can I tell the difference and what is symatic?

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Tim Tierney (timtierney) said : 		#6

Oh. I'm so sorry. I didn't realize I spelt Synaptic wrong. Its not Symatic. Sorry about that.

Synaptic is one of the most important tools in Ubuntu. Its a program which manages the database of packages which can be installed on your machine from the Ubuntu repositories.

There are two very easy ways to get into Synaptic.
    + Press Alt + F2 and type "gksudo synaptic". The gksudo part will allow you to run this as superuser.
    + The other way it to choose System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager.

There are three packages you need to remove in order to fully remove a kernel. For all intents and purposes lets say you wanted to remove Linux 2.6.31-15 from your machine. There have been two new revisions since that kernel so you probably won't need that one anymore.

You can use the search function to find these packages faster.

The three packages you want to remove are as follows:

    + linux-image-2.6.31-15-generic
    + linux-headers-2.6.31-15-generic
    + linux-headers-2.6.31-15

To remove the packages click on the green square and choose "mark for complete removal". Be careful to choose the right ones. Your system won't boot correctly if you do this wrong.

With these three packages selected click the apply button at the top and follow the instructions.

If you watch the terminal while its removing the packages, you will see a command run called "update-grub". That command rebuilds your GRUB configuration. It will search for your currently installed kernels and Windows boot loader.

Hope this helps.

Tim Tierney

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SirPuma (marobison68) said : 		#7

Thank you for the reply. I think I can manage that. I'll give it a go and see what happens. Worse case scenario I'll be reinstalling Ubuntu, not a big deal as I'm doing all this to learn something new.

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