Big list of Kernels in your grub menu Bro!!

Just returned back from vacation. Really had a great time, a wonderful trip. Really could not find any time for my machines. While on the way for my trip to “Ashtavinayak”, I got a call from my roomie , “Bro !! wanna urgently use your lappy”. The obvious answer was, “Take it Bro!! “.

My roomie was really pissed off, looking at the long list of selections of kernel in my Grub Menu, He being a Windows user and never had a dual boot system, looking at the grub, first thing which came out of his mouth was “What the f***?”. He called me back “Dude !! WT* was that? keep it clean, keep it simple. Your system looks like alien to me”.

That made me give a bath to my GRUB Menu, so that my roomies don’t get the stinking smell. Follow the steps below to do the same bro! 🙂

For checking which kernel you are using currenlty, run the terminal command

$ uname -r

You can find all the installed Kernel images in

/boot

You can list all the kernels installed, by using the terminal command

$ ls vmlinuz*

This will list all the installed kernel images peresent in /boot folder, It will be somewhat like

vmlinuz-2.6.38-1-generic
vmlinuz-2.6.36-1-generic
…….
…….
…….

From the above list identify the kernel you wanna remove and for this run the terminal command

$ sudo apt-get remove linux-image-2.6.36-1-generic linux-image-2.6.36-1-generic … … … …

Once this is done, you will have to update grub to display the new list

$ sudo update-grub

Restart the system to see the new list.
Bro!!, hope this makes ur life easier ….

Grub 2 and high resolution background …

GRUB 2 like GNOME 3 is completely written from scratch with improved flexibility and performance. GRUB 2 is version 1.98 or higher, the latest available version AFAIK is 1.99~RC.

You can check the version of your GRUB using the terminal command

grub-install -v

Though its mentioned that GRUB 2, is shipped along with Natty Narwhal, somehow it was not installed on my system on upgrading to Natty. I had to separately install it.

Major features of GRUB 2 are listed below

• Scripting support including conditional statements and
• functions
• Dynamic module loading
• Rescue mode
• Custom Menus
• Themes
• Graphical boot menu support and improved splash capability
• Boot LiveCD ISO images directly from hard drive
• New configuration file structure
• Non-x86 platform support (such as PowerPC)
• Universal support for UUIDs (not just Ubuntu)

Some of the differences you will see in GRUB 2 are listed below

• On New installation with no other installed OS for dual boot GRUB 2 Menu will not been displayed and will jump directly to the desktop, and for you to display Menu, hold down the “SHIFT” key
• /boot/grub/menu.lst is replaced by /boot/grub/grub.cfg, this file has no write permission even for root and is overwritten anytime there is an update, a kernel is added/removed, or the user runs update-grub.
• Running update-grub updates the list of accesible Kernels from the directory of files in /boot.
• Now the question is how can we customise the entries If /boot/grub/grub.cfg can’t be edited ? No worries, one can use a custom file, /etc/grub.d/40_custom, in which the user can place his own entries. This file will not be overwritten.
• The primary configuration file for changing menu display settings is /etc/default/grub and there are multiple files for configuring the menu – all the files in the /etc/grub.d/ directory.
• Partition numbering has changed. The first partition is now 1 rather than 0. The first device is still hd0 by default (no change), although this can be changed in /boot/grub/device.map.
• One more major difference is , no hassles for making the entries of you Windows OS or any other OSs,GRUB 2 provides automated searches for other OS whenever update-grub is executed..
• Support for high resolution background and in a very easy steps, definitely like how humans do 🙂

How to install GRUB 2 ?

sudo apt-get install grub-pc

Follow the interactive Menu for Installation and reboot, Select

chainload into GRUB2

Check if everything is working fine, and after confirmation, use the terminal command

sudo upgrade-from-grub-legacy

You GRUB 2 is ready for use.

How to have a high resolution image background for my GRUB 2 ?
Simple ,
Copy any image (jpg, png or tga) to the /boot/grub folder and run the terminal command.

“sudo update-grub”.

GRUB 2 follows the below priority for searching the background

• GRUB_BACKGROUND= setting in /etc/default/grub
• First image found in /boot/grub in this order: jpg, JPG, jpeg, JPEG, png, PNG, tga, TGA and multiple images of same extension will be taken in alphanumeric order
• Wallpaper designated in /usr/share/desktop-base/grub_backgorund.sh (if desktop-base installed)
• /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png (if desktop-base is installed)
• Default theme

You can also do font/color/background settings but all that in next session, signing off for now.