Friendly Tech Ninja Linux how-to's for beginners

Howto: Speed Up Grub Boot Loader Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

This howto is for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope or later (to do the same thing on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala go Howto: Speed Up GRUB2 Boot Loader on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala). Basically I'll show you how to speed up or remove the the GRUB timeout and

Step 1

Open up your Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and enter:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Note: You can use whatever editor you like, I personally like vim - So I'd type

eg. sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst

You'll now be prompted to enter your password, do so

Step 2

In your editor scroll down to where it says "timeout". This determines the length of the countdown before grub auto boots into your default OS.

You can change this to any value you like (pretty sure a negative number isn't going to help boot times...), if you've got multiple OS's then I'd recommend changing the value to three,

timeout 3

Then save and exit.

This will give you 3 seconds to choose which OS or kernel you'd like to boot into. However if Ubuntu is your only OS just set it to 0 and if you need to access the boot menu list just press ESC when you see the flash prompt, but remember you'll have to be quick!

Next time you boot your machine you'll now see the timer has changed to your desired length or been remove.

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