Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Get Grub2 to save last chosen entry

Every piece of pseudo-help I've read on this matter says:

"edit /etc/default/grub, and set GRUB_DEFAULT=saved" to save your default boot choice.

While this is true, its not complete. It's not what 90+% of the people are looking for. It's a question of semantics.

I want to save my default boot choice EVERY TIME I BOOT... i.e. save the last chosen entry every time I boot - for multi-OS systems, I believe this is fundamental.

For this to happen, you need to ADD to /etc/default/grub (it's missing altogether in the file) the entry:

GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true

This solves this issue. Without this line, /boot/grub/grubenv never gets updated when you choose you boot entry in grub boot menu.

This option is listed in 'info grub', but appears nowhere in the /etc/grub.d/* files.

Following the usual notation, the entry should be in the file, set as false and commented, indicating the default option if omitted:

#GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=false

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