Configuring grub / grub2 to indicate the boot menu items

[Steve Holmes]

OK, I got it to work with the new grub configurations.  Let me
describe what I did here.

With my grub2 setup on my archlinux system, I went into the 10linux
script found in /etc/grub.d; I believe this file is a standard issue
script for all distros using grub2.  Not sure if any of it was
customized by Arch developers or not.  I looked for the second
occurrence of
linux_entry.  The first occurrence is a function definition so we
don't want to change anything there.  The next or second occurrence
from the top will build the first menu option in your grub.cfg file.
The first quoted string following the 'linux_entry' call specifies the
menu title.  It currently begins with the variable ${OS}.  I just
stuck a Ctrl-G in front of this variable and immediately following the
opening quote mark.  Myself, I used emacs to do this by pressing c-q
followed by the Ctrl-G character.

After that, I saved and closed the file and did 
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
to regenerate the grub.cfg file.  On my system, I do not have a
update-grub command.  Dunno if that is a local Arch modification or if
update-grub is just on other distros.  Anyway, I looked at grub.cfg
for good measure and saw the ^G in the right spot.  I reboot and I
have the beep on the top menu item with this new configuration.  It
works like it always did before too.

The only side effect for me is I have to re-figure how to get the
right parms in for me to have a nice big display again.  But that's
another issue for me to work out.  I had been using an old grub.cfg
for a long time and never got around to using the new config file
system for grub.

On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 08:12:09AM -0400, Kitty Litter wrote:
>        I am hardly a grub 2 expert but you need to edit
> /etc/default/grub and uncomment the line grub_init_tune and modify
> the tempo, frequency and duration to get the desired beep. Then you
> must run update-grub as root to incorporate these changes into
> /boot/grub/grub.cfg. You aren't supposed to edit this file directly.
> If you try putting a ctrl-g in the title of a menu in
> /etc/grub.d/10_linux you will get a beep when you press enter on an
> item but not when you arrow passed it, at least that was the
> behavior when I tried it 6 months ago. After you run update-grub you
> can look at /boot/grub/grub.cfg to see what order the menu items
> will be in. The menu items don't appear to wrap so if you want the
> last item you could arrow down a bunch of times and press enter.
> Remember you must run update-grub to incorporate these changes into
> grub.cfg. Also, info grub for grub docs.
> 
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