Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

Getting ready to set up a dual-boot system on any computer can be more than a little intimidating.  You have to either re-partition your entire computer, or at least resize an existing partition, if you want your two (or more) operating systems installed side-by-side.  With the advent of Wubi, it’s possible to install Ubuntu inside Windows, as if installing a regular program and not an operating system.  It’s a simple process that we’ve covered in great detail.

One unfortunate side-effect of using Wubi is that in order to boot into Ubuntu, which is not the default operating system (the initial boot manager you see is the Windows Boot Manager, which makes Windows the default), you need to click through two boot menus.  The first – as mentioned – is the Windows Boot Manager.

After clicking down to the Ubuntu option and hitting Enter, you’re immediately shown another boot manager; this time the GRUB2 menu which shows you the version of Ubuntu you have installed.

This isn’t so bad, except the GRUB2 menu defaults to a 10-second timeout, which means you have to do something (hit Enter or navigate to the kernel you want to use), or simply wait for the 10 seconds to count down before Ubuntu starts booting.

This is not a “bad” situation by any means; it’s just a bit of a hassle to wait (yes, we’re impatient folks!).  Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to change the boot order or shorten the timeout period.

Note: if you want to update the Windows Boot Manager, you can do that from Windows with a simple GUI, as discussed in this article.

On the Ubuntu side of things, there are many GRUB2 configuration files floating around.  Knowing which to edit, and which to leave alone, is the tricky part.  Before Ubuntu 9.10, a legacy version of GRUB was used that had but a single configuration file, which could be easily edited by hand.  With GRUB2, there are multiple files, each configuring a certain set of options.  When one is edited, the meta configuration file (located at /boot/grub/grub.cfg) must be updated so it acknowledges those changes.  That’s what we’ll do in this article, after changing the timeout period.

First, open up a Terminal.

Next, type sudo nano /etc/default/grub to see your options.

It should look a little something like this.

For decreasing the timeout period, the option we’re looking for is this one:

We can change this to something shorter (say, 3 seconds, which would still give us time to hit an arrow key to stop the timeout countdown), or even to zero, which would hide the GRUB2 menu altogether.

If you’ve had Ubuntu installed via Wubi long enough, you may have updated your kernel image to a newer version.  By default in Ubuntu the newest kernel is always the one that gets used.  If, on the other hand, you want to use an older kernel all the time, you can make it the default.  Let’s say the kernel you want is the 3rd on in your list of available kernels.  You would change the GRUB_DEFAULT option.  The standard default is this:

We would change it to this:

Why did we change it to 2 and not 3?  If you remember, the standard was GRUB_DEFAULT=0, which launched the first item on our list.  So, the default (0), was one less than the item’s place in the menu.  So the third item (the one we want in our example), would be designated as 2, as shown above.  Weird, but that’s how it is.

When you’re finished, go ahead and save your changes.  Before you leave the Terminal entirely, however, we need to update the changes we made so GRUB is aware of them.  To do this, simply type sudo upgrade-grub to start the process.

You’ll see text like this, informing you that the changes are being noted.

You’re now finished.  The next time you boot up – if you’ve made the changes shown below – you should have a new default once you reach the GRUB2 menu – and if you set your default timeout to zero seconds, you won’t even see it.