Show and hide the GRUB Menu on Ubuntu

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When Ubuntu boots, you normally briefly see a screen that says “GRUB loading. please wait… Press Esc to enter the menu…”

If you are hacking around your system and would prefer to always see the GRUB menu there’s an easy fix.

Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file using the following command

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Hide GRUB Menu

By default GRUB Hides the menu .

Now search the section that looks like this

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
hiddenmenu

Show GRUB Menu

Put a # before hiddenmenu to comment that line out

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
#hiddenmenu

Save the file, and you should see the menu the next time you reboot.

Change the GRUB Menu Timeout value on Ubuntu

When your Ubuntu system boots, you will see the GRUB menu if you hit the Esc key, or if you’ve enabled the menu to show by default. The only issue with this is that the default timeout is only 3 seconds. You may want to increase this amount or you may even want to decrease it. Either one is simple.

Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file using the following command

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now find the following section

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 3

The timeout value is in seconds. Save the file, and when you reboot you will have that many seconds to choose the menu item you want.

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