September 14th, 2008 Posted in Software | No Comments »
Well I just finished installing Ubuntu on my laptop and the only thing that bothered me was that it automatically booted ubuntu as default when you don’t select anything else on startup (like vista), problem is that I mostly need vista and I’m not always at the pc when booting… So I googled and found that it is so easy to change the default OS and I thought I’d share it with you:
First, you’ll have to launch your terminal in Ubuntu. It’s probably at Applications > Accessories > Terminal.
Type this in terminal:
gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
You’ll be prompted for you password as this operation requires elevated permissions.
There are some GRUB settings that you can consider changing:
timeout sec
You can change it to 5 seconds like I did so it loads into your OS faster. I’m always away from my computer during the boot up ’cause I hate to watch things boot up.
timeout 5
default num
Changing the default startup OS is extremely helpful.
default 6
Booting up to Ubuntu or Windows Vista using GRUB.

Why set default to 6? Windows Vista is the at position 6, remember that programmers, unlike my kindergarten teacher, loves counting from 0. From the above picture, my ‘default’ should be set to 6. It may be different in your set up.
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