I’ve been finding it hard to think of new things to post, so I’ve been lurking in Ubuntu’s main IRC chat room at Freenode to see what people are asking about. Unfortunately, I don’t interact well in a hectic room with a dozen conversations taking place at the same time. So, I thought it best to bring those questions that I can answer here so I can share them with the rest of the Internet. The first deals with making grub wait for you to choose an option rather than letting it happen automagically.

(08:37:06 PM) zrak: how to edit grub so it will always enter the menu
(08:37:18 PM) zrak: because now it says to enter esc so i can enter grub

Open a terminal window and at the command prompt enter:
gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

You’ll be prompted for your password to have access to edit this system file. Find the following lines:

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

Comment out the hiddenmenu line to have it show on every boot.

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

You can also change the timeout option to 0 to have it wait forever for you to choose which menu option to boot.

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout        0

Those settings will stay until you decide to change them again. If there is a kernel update, they’ll remain intact. When you’re finished editing, save the file and close gedit. The next time you reboot, your new settings will take effect.

This isn’t unique to Ubuntu. Any Linux distribution using Grub as its boot loader can use the same options in its config file. Different distros have different layouts to their menu.lst file, but the config options will work just the same. Look at your distro’s menu.lst and take notice of any comments. Put your settings in the correct places and enjoy the same.

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