This tutorial describes how to edit the GRUB menu. It will also show how to add operating systems and how to add splash screens.
What everything means
To start off I will go over why you would use GRUB and what it all means.
The reason anyone would use the GRUB menu is to dual-boot two different operating systems. All it is is a simple DOS menu that you select which operating system you want to load during boot-up.
To open it type –
gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
This will open up the menu.lst (the file in which you edit the GRUB Menu) in a simple text editor while giving you the ability to make changes and save them.
You will see a bunch of lines at first that all begin with “#”. That tells the file to skip over these lines when reading the file. Scroll down into you stop seeing them.
Title – This is what is shown when the menu loads at boot up. Editing this will only change what is written on the screen.
Root – You likely have something along these lines “(hd0,1)”. “hd0” refers to the your hard drive while 1 points to the partition. Note that for GRUB, partitions start at 0 and not 1. for example 0=Partition 1, 1=Partition 2 and so on.
Kernel -Pretty self-explanatory. This just is to ask what kernel version you would like to boot with.
Initrd – This is simple a temporary file system used by the kernel during a boot till the real file system can be mounted.
That is the basics of what all those lines mean.
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