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[Derek Broughton]

Nigel Henry wrote:

>> Fine - but that's not much help if you (as Jake has) have already
>> installed
>> both OS's and you don't have a grub menu.  In my case, the installer got
>> it right with every install since Warty - except the time I installed to
>> an external drive, but there's enough anecdotal evidence that, even if
>> there isn't anything actually wrong with the installer, it's not too
>> difficult for a user to complete the install without getting grub
>> properly set up.
>>
>> That said, I think Nils probably got it right, with the menu just being
>> hidden.
> 
> It has to be said also that the default timeout of 5secs before Grub boots
> the default kernel passes very quickly when you perhaps are a bit
> confused, and you can find yourself being booted into Ubuntu, rather than
> having the time to think of what to do to get the menu, and stop the
> countdown.

Yes.  I set mine to 10 seconds as the best (for me) compromise between a
fast boot and giving me enough time to select my second OS, and even then,
when I'm really trying to boot into another OS, I frequently miss the
prompt :-( [you know, it's taking 60 seconds to shut down, so you start
doing something else, then all of a sudden you see it starting Linux
already]

> The first thing I do with a new install is to go into /boot/grub/grub.conf
> (or menu.lst, if thats the only file there), and change the default
> timeout to 30secs, and comment out the hiddenmenu line.
> 
> Talking about Ubuntu/Kubuntu's Grub picking up other OS's on the system,
> it finds every OS that it can that are on your drives, and adds them to
> Grubs menu. I have one drive sda, which has all the distros on it, and
> another drive sdb, which is just for data. The first 2 partitions on sdb
> are vfat (FAT32). Grub always picks these up, and creates a chainloader to
> them, even though no operating system exists on these partitions. 

Grub doesn't actually do that, the installer does.  They're already there in
menu.lst before grub is ever installed on the drive, or invoked.  But my
experience is that it _doesn't_ always catch every partition.  It's pretty
darn good, but it would be very hard for it to recognize _every_ possible
bootable partition.

> I mean "Other" is a bit obscure as well

:-)  I've taken to using exactly that - "Other" is a chainloader to whatever
is on sda1 - which is my recent test OS of interest.

-- 
derek