I'm going to do a quick detour to talk about
grub.
Grub is the boot manager of choice for Linux systems, and the one installed by default by
Ubuntu, among others. My desktop at home dual boots between Ubuntu and Windows (I have gaming needs, after all), and Windows is the default operating system, so my wife doesn't have to do anything.
Setting that default was not exactly trivial. The web abounds with instructions on how to choose the default, most of which refer to the previous version of grub. About the newer version, not so much information.
So, in the end I used Ubuntu's
Startup Manager to set this up. By the way, can anyone explain to me why you use Startup Manager to choose which OS to boot, and
Bootup Manager to choose which processes will start? Sorry, I digress...
That worked nicely until the day I upgraded the system, at which point a new entry was created, changing the relative position of the Windows boot. That was disagreeable, so I decided to take a closer look.
The configuration used by grub during boot is located at /boot/grub, in particular /boot/grub/grub.cfg. But you shouldn't edit this file directly -- it is generated from the scripts located at /etc/grub, plus configuration on /etc/default/grub. Usually, it is this latter file you should edit.
To change the default operating system, you edit /etc/default/grub, change the setting GRUB_DEFAULT, and then run update-grub. Alas, the Startup Manager will do all this for you, but there is one thing the Startup Manager doesn't do...
So, here's the trick. The GRUB_DEFAULT is usually set to a number, indicating the relative position of the entry you want, but it can also be set to a name! To see what the entry names are, you can do a "grep menuentry /boot/grub/grub.cfg" -- the names are the strings between single or double-quotes right after "menuentry". For example:
$ grep menuentry /boot/grub/grub.cfg
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-11-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-11-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-10-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-10-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-8-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-8-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" {
menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" {
This also shows why Startup Manager uses numbers instead of names: so that the latest Linux is always chosen. This seems a poor choice for me, for anything except the first entry, but there you go.
Anyway, once you got the name, all you have to do is edit /etc/default/grub, change the setting GRUB_DEFAULT, so that it is set to the name of the entry you want (don't forget the quotes), and then run update-grub.
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