How do you change the boot delay time on GRUB?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2010 at 11:51:12AM -0400, Kevin Cozens wrote:
> You aren't the only one. I certainly don't "get it". I went back to
> using grub 1 on both of my machines.
>
> The configuration file for grub 2 seemed exceedingly complex compared to  
> the simple four line entries of grub 1. Grub 2 appeared to install, or  
> create, a bunch of .mod files in my /boot partition and caused problems  
> when doing kernel updates as the .mod files only allowed me to have 2  
> active kernels with no room for the new (third) one. The .mod files  
> might have been part of the kernel update process when using grub 2, but  
> I can't be sure about that. I also read in several places that you need  
> to run a command after changing the grub 2 configuration file to make  
> the changes available at the next boot. That smacks of the bad old days  
> of LILO. At least grub should still give you a command line so you can  
> enter the commands needed to make the system boot if you forgot to run  
> the grub update program.

The .mod files are part of making grub2 much more robust.  Grub1 used
a black map in the stage1 to load stage2 similar to how lilo uses
blockmaps to load everything (which makes lilo very much not robust
against any changes and unable to handle anything at boot time that wasn't
preconfigured in).  Grub2 embeds the essential modules into stage1 and
hence doesn't use blockmaps for anything.  Any additional features are
loaded as modules in stage2 from the filesystem.  This should make grub2
completely immune against any filesystem changes or updates, which grub1
wasn't for the stage2 file, and lilo isn't for any files it accesses.

The modules are also part of having added a ton of new features and
support for a lot more operating systems.  The old everything in one
stage2 binary simply wasn't scalable even if you didn't care about the
robustness issue.

> With grub 1, if you don't want to automatically boot into your default  
> OS after a fixed delay, just comment out the "timeout" line and grub  
> will wait indefinitely.

And in grub2 just set it to -1 and you get the same thing.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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