GRUB_DEFAULT default (not a typo)

[Basil Chupin]

On 05/04/13 03:56, Tom H wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've been following another discussion, "Changing grub default boot order"
>> and took a look at /etc/default/grub, where the line
>> GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
>> appeared. I don't think I put that there, but I could not swear to it. I
>> seem to recall that this setting used to cause GRUB to remember the last
>> entry used and to use it again by default. That is not happening on my
>> machine, a fresh Xubuntu install of 12.04.
>>
>> Instead, GRUB always defaults to entry 0, and I have to change it to entry 5
>> because entry 0 is bogus, GRUB having picked up some historical artifacts
>> and put them in the menu.
>>
>> This seems weird. Should it work? Should it even be allowed? It has
>> persisted through several kernel upgrades, so it has not caused great
>> mischief....
> AFAIK Ubuntu's default is "GRUB_DEFAULT=0" (it's upstreams's default) .
>
> "GRUB_DEFAULT=saved" is useful/functional if you've used
> "grub-set-default" or "grub-reboot" to set the default grub entry or
> if you've set "GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true" (which is unset by default and
> which you need to set in order for grub ro re-use the last menuentry
> choice).

I have never, ever, fiddled with these settings and yet I can see that 
GRUB_DEFAULT is set to "saved" and not to some numeric value (except 
where I have now set it in 2 places to the value of "2" to boot into the 
second OS installed on my system). But this doesn't mean that you are 
not correct when you state that "0" is the default setting 'upstream'.

BC

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