Sometimes booting your Linux system can be relatively long. It depends often on how many services your system needs to start while booting.

There’s also a phase which takes time: the boot-loader. It displays a menu in which you can choose which kernel to use or starting another operating system. If you don’t choose anything, there is a timeout and then the boot-loader picks up the default kernel/operating system.

Ubuntu 10.10 sets this timeout to 10 seconds which can be seen as long. It’s possible to change that.

How? Well the boot-loader used by Ubuntu is GRUB2. Since 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the file for configuring it is /etc/default/grub.

In Ubuntu you need to use sudo for editing this file (replace emacs by your editor of choice):
sudo emacs /etc/default/grub

Then you need to find the setting GRUB_TIMEOUT and change its value to 3 seconds for instance:
GRUB_TIMEOUT=3

Save the file and you have done most of the work!

To achieve it, you need now to run update-grub to update the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg:
~$ sudo update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-25-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
done
~$


You can now reboot your system if you want to test it 🙂