Here is a little note to remind me how to customize GRUB the (k)Ubuntu way.

Photograph of a laptop screen showing the GRUB menu cluttered with fourteen Ubuntu kernel entries, each duplicated in recovery mode, ending on memtest86+

In fact the only important information I need to remember is the location of the file containing all GRUB options: 

1$ sudo vi /etc/default/grub

There I’ve lowered the GRUB_TIMEOUT option to 1 second to speed up the boot process (default was 10 seconds).

I also had some sound issues with the latest Karmic Koala’s kernel upgrade. So I’ve changed the GRUB_DEFAULT variable from 0 to 2 . This tells GRUB to boot the third entry of the menu, which correspond to the kernel I was using before the bad upgrade. And be careful: you have to fix this index on each following kernel upgrade, because the given position is absolute and new kernels add their own entries at the top of the menu.

And finally, after all these changes, don’t forget to regenerate all the GRUB’s scripts with the following command: 

1$ sudo update-grub