How to have a custom Grub2 menu that is maintenance free

[cecilpierce]

How can I add Burg boot loader to Bionic Beaver ?

[cecilpierce]

How can I add Burg boot loader to Bionic Beaver ?

Sorry for the repost 1

[oldfred]

Burg has not been supported for years. Best not to use it.
If using BIOS, this thread is your best source for grub configuration.

If you have a newer (last 5 years) hardware and it will be UEFI. And and installs should be UEFI.
Then you can use rEFInd boot manager which also is a gui.
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

New UEFI systems have their own boot manager (menu).
Grub is both the boot manager and boot loader for most Linux systems.

[Cavsfan]

@oldfred, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that an UEFI computer cannot be customized in the same manor as Legacy MBR partitioning allowed.

I've got a newer computer and have everything installed on a 480GB SSD UEFI - Windows 10, Arch Linux and Xubuntu 16.04 so far and the Xubuntu kernels are named differently.
Instead of the generic names:
linux /vmlinuz
initrd /initrd.img

In EFI they are:
linux /boot/vmlinuz-4.13.0-38-generic
interd /boot/initrd.img-4.13.0-38-generic

This would require editing the custom entries every time a new kernel gets installed, which is the exact opposite reason this idea came about. There is a whole lot more than just the kernel names it appears too.

What do you think?

[Dennis N]

This would require editing the custom entries every time a new kernel gets installed, which is the exact opposite reason this idea came about...

Just a comment (pardon me for butting in before oldfred).

/vmlinuz and /initrd.img are just symbolic links to the newest kernel, and they function the same regardless of whether you installed under UEFI or BIOS. So that should be no problem, at least when sticking with Ubuntu flavors or Linux Mint.

Other distros (like Fedora) don't use these symbolic links but it is still possible to have a maintainance free system including those on a UEFI system. I don't think it's always possible with BIOS. So advantage to UEFI.

[oldfred]

+1 on Dennis N's comments.

I am still using 40_custom as you and Ranch Hand recommened way back when. And now I only have UEFI.

I turn off os-prober and use 40_custom to boot other installs.
The issue I have with Ubuntu's version of grub is that it is hard coded to "ubuntu" throughout. Other versions of grub seem to use this:
efi_distributor = bootloader_id; I did see a bug report long time ago where someone wanted an entry for Kubuntu so that modified grub like this from:
install_efi_ubuntu_flavours.patch
efi_distributor = bootloader_id;
+ if (strcmp (efi_distributor, "kubuntu") == 0)
+ efi_distributor = "ubuntu";
switch (platform)

I do not understand the c code, but they replace Ubuntu with Kubuntu.

I have wanted different distributors so I could directly boot more than one Ubuntu directly from UEFI. But all install to one ESP or /EFI/ubuntu.

[Cavsfan]

Just a comment (pardon me for butting in before oldfred).

/vmlinuz and /initrd.img are just symbolic links to the newest kernel, and they function the same regardless of whether you installed under UEFI or BIOS. So that should be no problem, at least when sticking with Ubuntu flavors or Linux Mint.

Other distros (like Fedora) don't use these symbolic links but it is still possible to have a maintainance free system including those on a UEFI system. I don't think it's always possible with BIOS. So advantage to UEFI.

+1 on Dennis N's comments.

I am still using 40_custom as you and Ranch Hand recommened way back when. And now I only have UEFI.

I turn off os-prober and use 40_custom to boot other installs.
The issue I have with Ubuntu's version of grub is that it is hard coded to "ubuntu" throughout. Other versions of grub seem to use this:
efi_distributor = bootloader_id; I did see a bug report long time ago where someone wanted an entry for Kubuntu so that modified grub like this from:
install_efi_ubuntu_flavours.patch
efi_distributor = bootloader_id;
+ if (strcmp (efi_distributor, "kubuntu") == 0)
+ efi_distributor = "ubuntu";
switch (platform)

I do not understand the c code, but they replace Ubuntu with Kubuntu.

I have wanted different distributors so I could directly boot more than one Ubuntu directly from UEFI. But all install to one ESP or /EFI/ubuntu.

Boy, that is some good news! Thanks Dennis for the comments. I thought this Wiki was going to become obsolete with EFI Boot.

@oldfred, those are also encouraging words! When I first installed Xubuntu 16.04 LTS, the grub would not even boot back into Xubuntu for some reason.

Luckily, in BIOS, I was able to change it to Arch_grub and it booted just fine into anything.

I'll work on it some more and see if I can come with what needs done for EFI, this stuff is Greek to me.

But, that which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger!

[oldfred]

I quickly learned to backup ESP - efi system partition.
Each install of Ubuntu overwrites the previous install in ESP. But it is only 3 lines as configfile to find full grub.cfg in your install. So now I often just manually edit to correct UUID & partition.
But editing ESP requires changes or use of live flash drive, I know try to remember to change setting while still in live installer, but some newer versions do not let install user 999 edit anything else.

In fstab is a setting on mounting ESP. With 14.04 it was defaults, but now they change it to 'umask=0077' or no permissions. I may change settings back to that, as I assume it is for security. With defaults any user in your system could change settings since with FAT32 only ownership & permissions are set at mounting. But I keep finding many times I want to change, backup or edit something in ESP. Note that Boot-Repair also changes to defaults so it can edit settings.

After my last install of bionic and with fstab permissions set so I can access it.
sudo cp -a /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ /boot/efi/EFI/bionic
sudo cp -a /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu_bu/grub.cfg /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg

fred@Asusz97:~$ cat /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg
search.fs_uuid 255a2800-b871-4fdf-a809-16987e64b8b3 root hd0,gpt6 
set prefix=($root)'/boot/grub'
configfile $prefix/grub.cfg

I installed Fedora, more just to see difference with grub2 than for any other reason. When I installed Fedora to sdb I told it to install grub to ESP on sdb which I do with Ubuntu, but Ubuntu never does. I was presently surprised that Fedora's grub2 did install to ESP on sdb. but it has full grub.cfg embedded in the .efi boot file and some caution on how to reinstall grub or grub2 defaults to a different configuration than Fedora's default.I prefer that Ubuntu's grub.cfg is separate.

[Cavsfan]

I quickly learned to backup ESP - efi system partition.
Each install of Ubuntu overwrites the previous install in ESP. But it is only 3 lines as configfile to find full grub.cfg in your install. So now I often just manually edit to correct UUID & partition.
But editing ESP requires changes or use of live flash drive, I know try to remember to change setting while still in live installer, but some newer versions do not let install user 999 edit anything else.

In fstab is a setting on mounting ESP. With 14.04 it was defaults, but now they change it to 'umask=0077' or no permissions. I may change settings back to that, as I assume it is for security. With defaults any user in your system could change settings since with FAT32 only ownership & permissions are set at mounting. But I keep finding many times I want to change, backup or edit something in ESP. Note that Boot-Repair also changes to defaults so it can edit settings.

After my last install of bionic and with fstab permissions set so I can access it.
sudo cp -a /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/ /boot/efi/EFI/bionic
sudo cp -a /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu_bu/grub.cfg /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg

fred@Asusz97:~$ cat /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg
search.fs_uuid 255a2800-b871-4fdf-a809-16987e64b8b3 root hd0,gpt6 
set prefix=($root)'/boot/grub'
configfile $prefix/grub.cfg

I installed Fedora, more just to see difference with grub2 than for any other reason. When I installed Fedora to sdb I told it to install grub to ESP on sdb which I do with Ubuntu, but Ubuntu never does. I was presently surprised that Fedora's grub2 did install to ESP on sdb. but it has full grub.cfg embedded in the .efi boot file and some caution on how to reinstall grub or grub2 defaults to a different configuration than Fedora's default.I prefer that Ubuntu's grub.cfg is separate.

Thanks for all of that information. I'm brain dead today, I'll definitely make notes and re-read that tomorrow.

You should see the way you have to do grub-install on Arch, it isn't to a simple drive like /dev/sda.

It is like this:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/ --bootloader-id=ArchLinux

[oldfred]

That is the full grub command, I think other installs build the command by adding the parameters they want.
I have used that type of command to just install grub to a smaller flash drive with just ISO so I could boot the ISO with grub. But now normally do a full install as larger flash drives are now relatively inexpensive.