Grub2 and multiple boot different ubuntu versions

[Colin Law]

On 24 March 2010 15:34, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On 03/24/2010 02:34 AM, Colin Law wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I had a double boot setup with XP and Karmic.  I installed Lucid Beta
>> 1 in a separate partition and on boot it gives me the menu with Lucid
>> at the top followed by Karmic kernels and XP, and all works well.  As
>> Lucid is just for testing, however, I want it do default to Karmic
>> boot so I set GRUB_DEFAULT=5 in /etc/default/grub, run sudo
>> update-grub and again all is well.
>> Each time the Lucid kernel is updated, however, I need to add two to
>> GRUB_DEFAULT as there are new kernels above it.  I wonder whether it
>> is possible to rearrange the grub menu so Karmic is at the top and I
>> can leave the default at 0.  I have contemplated booting into Karmic
>> and running update-grub but I hesitate to do this in case it is a bad
>> idea, not really understanding how grub works.
>> It would be nice if grub allowed a regex setting for the default boot
>> when specifying a string, defaulting to the first matching name, but I
>> have not seen this in the docs.  It would seem like a trivial
>> extension.
>>
>> Colin
>>
>
> I have Win7, 8.04, 9.10, and 10.04 installed. Unfortunately, I added
> 8.04 as an afterthought (needed to test a 64bit 8.04 app). Because I
> used a liveCD instead of an AlternateCD for the 8.04 install, that
> installed the old grub. Having had the same issue as you've mentioned
> with the lucid kernel updates, I booted into karmic from the liveCD, and
> did a grub reinstall. See:
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2
> [Reinstalling from LiveCD]
> That put karmic at the top, then Win7, 8.04, and then 10.04. Ironically
> enough, both 8.04 and 9.10 have more kernels installed, so it's a bit of
> work to get down to 10.04. I guess it's time to clean :-)

Great, many thanks

Colin