Configuring grub / grub2 to indicate the boot menu items

[Steve Holmes]

I have to add one other point here; you need to be sure that your
/etc/default/grub file has the TERMINAL=console uncommentted.  If not,
you will get a graphical display and for whatever reason, the
Control-G trick won't work unless terminal is set to console.  When I
go with the graphical default, I can have the highest resolution
possible and have it passed onto the kernel and I end up with a dis
play of 92 lines plus 256 columns.  That's an interesting side effect
but with a console that big, it ends up being slow to fill.  So there
seems to be a trade off here between a graphical terminal with no menu
item beeps or a text console defaulting to yucky 80 by 25 size but
have a beep on the menu item of your choice.

On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 02:45:58AM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> 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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