Change the GRUB Menu Timeout on Ubuntu
When your Ubuntu system boots, you will see the GRUB menu if you hit the Esc key, or if you’ve enabled the menu to show by default. The only issue with this is that the default timeout is only 3 seconds. You may want to increase this amount… or you may even want to decrease it. Either one is simple.
Open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your favorite text editor. I’m using gedit:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
Now find the section that looks like this:
## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 3
The timeout value is in seconds. Save the file, and when you reboot you will have that many seconds to choose the menu item you want.
Daily Email Updates
You can get our how-to articles in your inbox each day for free. Just enter your name and email below:
It would be useful to add that prevent the timer to runing the timeout line should be commented out e.g. #timeout 3.
I needed to do this and could not find out how to, anywhere on the web, so I experimented, and it worked.
I did it but how to make the splash image folder writable, please help me, I can’t paste any xpm image there
Dave,
I was looking for how to kill the timer and couldn’t find it anywhere either. And just to clarify for the other uber noobs like myself, commenting it out simply means putting a # in front of it. And goto the top of the window and click save when your done. Sorry if I’m over-clarifying, but for the first timers like myself sometimes the most obvious things get glossed over in the forums, and thats all it takes to get hung up.
I personally was expecting this grub editing to be more like entering cryptic commands, than just scrolling down a page and making changes and clicking save. I popped my terminal cherry with this sudo gedit command which I cut and pasted right of this page, all I had to do was type my password and ad a #….rather anticlimactic for all the terminal anxiety I was imagining.
Anyway thanks Dave and “The Geek” !
Thanks, it helped. Also it’s worth mentioning that setting the timeout to -1 deactivates timeout.
Hi everyone..,
I cant save my menu.lst file. An error pops up saying “Don’t have the permission to save this file”.
I m the only user in the system and i am the admin. Can any one pls tell me how to make that file to be saved.
Thanx.
Madhuranga,
You can not just openthe menu.lst file and change it. Under Ubuntu you can use the terminal window and enter:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
Now you can save the changes you make to the menu.lst file. The reason for this procedure is your own security.
dream47,
thanks for the help, ive been trying to save this over for ages.
again thankyou.
Jack