I am a DSL newbie. I have DSL installed on my Pen Drive that boots just fine on my notebook. No problem there. However, when I installed DSL to the Pen Drive I did not include all of the desired cheats to the startup string (forgot wheelmouse). So now I have to manually add this every time I boot per the instructions on DSL's Wiki. Though each time I do this, the change is temporary. Everytime I boot, the Grub list contains a single entry. What I would like to do is edit the menu.lst file to make the change permanent.

However...

Not only is the menu.lst file read only (located \boot\grub\menu.lst) it contains about ten options.

Where would the correct menu.lst be located (the one with the one entry that I see each time I boot from the pen drive). Also, once I do find the file how do I edit it since I am having trouble getting this one to open in other than read-only (I am trying "sudo vi menu.lst" from a terminal)

Thank you in advance!

are you saying that the menu you found in the stick bears no resemblance to the options you see on the boot up screen?

2) And that your bios is able to have boot order usb before cd or hd?

3) And that you are unable to use sudo or su to edid that file?

4) New question, have you tried to mount your stick when your hd is booted?

eg lets pretend you formatted stick as ext2 and checking your /var/log/syslog you see it is found as /dev/sdb and its currently readable as
/media/disk or /mnt/disk
then in your hard drive shell
su (or sudo) and password
umount /media/disk (or /mnt/disk)
mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb1 /media/disk
vi /media/disk/boot/grub/menu.lst or.....kwrite and navigate to the stick's menu

then make changes

vi (:wq!).....or save in kwrite etc

Correct, the menu on the pen drive (\boot\grub\menu.lst) bears no similarity to what I see when I boot to the pen drive.

Yes, the BIOS has USB device before CD or HD. In fact, if I take the same pen drive to other machines I get the same boot options when I boot to the pen drive.

Yes, unable to sudo to edit the file.

I have not tried mounting the pen drive once booted to the HD since the only OS's I have on the HD are of the Microsoft variety...

Problem resolved.

It helps to mount the boot partition and edit THAT menu.lst file.

My apologies...