Re: Setting GRUB 2 default menu entry

[Jordan Uggla]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 1:15 AM, Francesco Turco <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013, at 9:53, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
>> GRUB_DEFAULT does not change how entries are displayed, it defines
>> which menu entry will be booted. From your description it is not clear
>> what you mean. Did you expect default entry to be the first in the
>> list? Did you wait until grub started to boot default entry?
>
> I need a way to change the first default entry that is displayed at boot
> time. The one that comes before the submenu "Advanced options for Gentoo
> GNU/Linux". This is because I'd prefer not to use this submenu every
> time I reboot. I just like to select the first entry (the one before the
> submenu), but it should boot the right kernel, not the one that GRUB
> wants me to boot at the moment. I don't expect the default entry to be
> the first in the list. I expect the default entry to be the one I choose
> from the list. That is, the default entry should never be a random one.
> I should decide every time which entry becomes the default one. As it
> happened in GRUB legacy.

You are confusing the default entry (the entry which will be selected
GRUB_TIMEOUT seconds if there is no user input) and the first entry.
Please make a clear distinction between the two. If you're using
grub-mkconfig to generate your grub.cfg, then the first kernel entry
is the latest kernel version, as determined by the file name of the
image in a version sort, (not a "random" kernel version). You can make
the default entry the 3rd entry in the "Advanced Options for Gentoo"
by setting GRUB_DEFAULT="1>2" or you can use unique id's rather than
numbers to specify the entries in GRUB_DEFAULT, but remember that if
it's an entry in a submenu then you need to specify the submenu, then
the menu entry, as explained in the documentation I linked to.

If you want to have your preferred kernel as the first menu entry in
the menu, then you can write your grub.cfg by hand, as you did with
your menu.lst in grub legacy (there is no requirement that you use
grub-mkconfig to generate your grub.cfg).

-- 
Jordan Uggla (Jordan_U on irc.freenode.net)