Booting Linux without the dual boot?

One thing that really been bugging me is being forced to select either windows or linux every time I wanted to use my laptop. Up to the point that I would prefer to just run Linux as a VM appliance in Vista business. But lately I was thinking about booting Linux off a usb drive.... yet I would want to keep everything else on a partition within my T61's and only insert the usb drive when I want my machine to boot linux.

Damn Small seems like a good choice but it seems like its made to run off the usb drive itself rather then installing to the hd. I would like it to just load the boot files from the usb drive and let the rest of the system come from the hard drive.

I just don't want to see grub or any boot loader for longer then a 5 seconds at the most.

Nuking Vista all together did come to my mind but I need the Cisco software at my school to use the wireless connection next semester.

 

You can set the time grub stays open. Default of mine (Fedora 8 is 3 seconds).

 

Open the Grub conf file (/boot/grub/grub.conf) and look for the timeout=10 line and you can change the number (ex : timeout=2) so it waits for 2 seconds before loading the default OS. You can also choose which OS it boots by default in this file.

 

just so you know, ubuntu is different, it uses /boot/grub/menu.lst NOT /boot/grub/grub.conf (i noticed you have ubuntu on your machine. I think ubuntu is the only one that uses menu.lst instead of grub.conf however)

not sure how good you are with linux so ill elaborate a bit:
1) open terminal
2) type in 'sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst' (this is assuming you have ubuntu, otherwise try grub.conf instead of menu.lst)
3) locate this line:

Code:

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout         5

and change the 5 to however long you would like the grub menu to stay up before choosing the OS to boot.


Another option would be to install grub boot loader onto the usb stick and then set the boot sequence in your BIOS to boot off of removable drives first. This might involve some configuration, so post if you run into problems.

 

Or, just go to Synaptic and download Startup Manager, and graphically set the boot to whatever and however you want.

 

In ubuntu you can just install QGRUBEditor via synaptic.

It appears under applications-->System Tools-->QGRUBEditor

You can use it to set how long Grub will wait for user input.

 

Ok, I'll try that, I just need to reinstall it on my laptop since I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

I think I'm going to try out Mint on my laptop, I really liked the way the gui was set up when I took it on a test drive on my spare desktop. Since it uses the same packages as Ubuntu it should also be the same?

Also, will QGRUBeditor take care of old entries from kernel updates? That was one annoyance I had with grub.

 

that way isnt as fun though

 

Maybe I'll do it by nano after all... I'm getting better at linux now that I've been reading about the shell commands

I assume the same file would let me modify any older kernel entries? The thing I always hated about grub was it would show 4 or 5 different kernels after awhile. But I'll see how to set windows as default so it wouldn't accidentally boot into Linux while I'm in the middle of class Maybe that'll fix the multiple entry annoyance.

 

yeah, grub is highly customizable. I wouldnt recommend deleting hte entries for the other kernels, just comment them out using a # at the start of the line. Also, DONT get rid of recovery mode, that comes in handy alot (if you like to play with things like i do ). And, yes you can set windows to boot by default. Remember that it starts counting at 0, so if your grub menu looks like this:

linux (0)
recovery (1)
memtest (2)
xp (3)

it is actually entry 3, not 4 as you might think.

 

Gotta love stuff that starts at zero

Anyways, wifi didn't work off the bat like I thought it would, so I have to make that my first priority. Gotta love how even the user friendliest versions of Linux can still throw you a curve ball I kinda thought it would work right away because I thought Ubuntu did it before. Gonna go on Thinkwiki and mess with it.

After wifi I'll get back to grub and see if I can get it to the way I would like it. I also noticed that Mint has a customized grub screen that has a green leaf where Ubuntu just has a plain text screen.

 

Once you edit menu.lst (in Ubuntu), do you have to do anything to make the new boot configuration active? Like, do you have to run some command to update the boot sector or whatever it's called?

 

no, grub is stored directly on the linux partition. So once you save the file, the changes you made will take place immediately.

 

ok... thanks!

Wait...

You mean grub is stored directly on the boot partition... right?

Or maybe you mean my computer knows somehow to boot from the Linux partition... ok that's it, right? I get it.

At least I don't have to run anything.

 

well, since under linux there is a separate /boot directory where the grub files are stored im guessing there is just a pointer in the MBR that points to the /boot directory on your linux partition.

thats why if you delete your linux partitions without first fixing the MBR you wont be able to boot anything

if that helps?

 

I think I have everything set up the way I like it. I just need to change some boot/splash screens and I'll be ready to go!

Has anyone used or heard anything about the GFXgrub bootloader? I was eying it on my synaptic package manager but I decided to hold off on it until I hear what you guys have to say about it.

I used a combo of editing with nano and the startupmanager in synaptic. I was going to edit both by nano until I realized I didn't know what part of the text to change in the file. So I just used the manager but later I found a how-to on editing grub after looking up the graphic version of grub GFXgrub.

GFXgrub looks mighty fine I might say.

Thanks for the info guys.