Ubuntu 10.10 and grub menu

I just upgraded one my Ubuntu server from 10.04 to 10.10 (works flawlessly) and realized that I was prompted with the grub menu during a reboot. Since this is a cloud server and it being managed over SSH, I surely wanted that Grub automatically selects the latest kernel and does not wait for an input.

To be honest, I don’t know why this changed (well the only grief with the move from 10.04 to 10.10). Luckily, this is a easy task. All there is to do is to change a value in one of the grub conf files. Edit the file “/etc/grub.d/00_header” and search for “recordfail”. This should bring you to the line;

if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then
  set timeout=-1
else
  set timeout=${GRUB_TIMEOUT}
fi

Now, all there is to change is the value “-1”. The value 0 will bypass the menu and any greater value is the time of countdown after a unsuccessful boot. (I changed it to 3).

After you saved the change you need to run “sudo update-grub2” to apply the change. If all goes well, you should boot directly with the configured kernel during next reboot.