[Bug 918041] Re: Default GRUB menu entries are overly technical

[Leo H]

I fully support the points made and the solutions proposed by Denis (top
post), UbuntuFlo (#2) and Henry3 (#3).  As things stand, the Grub2 menu
is unclear, confusing and loaded with irrelevant old kernels languishing
on the hard drive.

Apart from presenting only relevant items and meaningful names, the Grub
start-up menu could also usefully be made to offer the opportunity to:

(1) select the default choice
(2) reorder the menu items
(3) change the value for the time-out counter (seconds)

An installed system at the moment lacks an easy way of setting these
basic choices without delving into the deep inner workings of Grub2.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/918041

Title:
  Default GRUB menu entries are overly technical

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  The names of the entries added to a typical Ubuntu-Windows dual-boot
  GRUB menu are meaningless, if not even uncomforting and confusing to
  the average user. For instance, my Ubuntu 12.04 alpha install has the
  following entries:

  Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-9-generic
  Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-9-generic (recovery mode)
  Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-8-generic
  Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-8-generic (recovery mode)
  Memory test (memtest86+)
  Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)
  Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)

  which is problematic in several ways:

  - The kernel versions that we show in the Ubuntu entries do not at all
  relate to anything that we present to an average user in the rest of
  the system ("what is a kernel anyway?").

  - There are multiple Ubuntus to choose from, with the average user not
  really knowing what the difference should be. ("Why do I have multiple
  Ubuntus now?" / "Why keep these old versions if there is a newer
  one?")

  - The memory test entries are not useful most of the time, but still
  very visibly clutter the boot menu and make it more tedious to select
  the secondary operating system entries beneath them.

  - The Windows entry has a "(loader)" suffix appended which seemingly
  signifies that it boots from a separate boot partition (as is the
  default case for Windows Vista and 7), but is absolutely needless
  information to the user.

  Ideally, the menu would look something like this:

  Ubuntu 12.04
  Ubuntu 12.04 (recovery mode)
  Windows 7

  or, including the second newest kernel version:

  Ubuntu 12.04
  Ubuntu 12.04 (recovery mode)
  Ubuntu 12.04 (last known good)
  Windows 7

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