Ubuntu 9.10 changing Grub Menu.lst
 

Does anyone have Ubuntu 9.10 installed on their hard drive with 2 or 3 other Distros? Life was simple before Ubuntu 9.10, just change the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and you're on your way. Now it's change a file, then run an update-grub command that updates another config file. Ok, enough of my complaning. Back to my question.. Does anyone have a sample /etc/default/grub file that has multiple Distros on it?
I don't want to have to run VirtualBox in order to use other Distros on my Hard Drive.

So what is the problem you're facing?

Have a read of this. It shows how to add entries to grub2, and should you still feel the need, safely revert to grub legacy.

As you discover UBUNTU 9.10 uses GRUB 2 .
So you do not have menu.lst but GRUB.CFG
If you install UBUNTU 9.10 as the last distro it should find all
you're other distros
There may occur a problem when you get a new kernell for you're other
distros , if you use UBUNTu GRUB , because than you have to change GRUB.CFG .
Do you feel you're self comfortable to edit the GRUB.CFG

You are not meant to edit grub.cfg directly.
Read the link syg00 has posted.

Well that might be so .
If done it now a few times , and nothing wend wrong

Hey Thanks syg00, that was a good link( I pasted the section below my Underline Comments). I have 2 laptops, one with a few distros on it, but that one I did an Upgrade through the Ubuntu9.10-Alternate-CD-i386.iso. Thank goodness I decided to keep my older Grub Menu when it was running through the Upgrade. That laptop still has the older Grub version (although I should have said no to remove the older files).

The other laptop I had is slightly older, and I did a straight install of Ubuntu 9.10, but I only noticed this when I went looking for the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and saw it was missing.

***For those who may not be aware...***
Although I've learned through trial an Error, lately with Ubuntu in general, it wants to be the keeper of the Grub Menu. I tried installing either OpenSuse or another distro's Grub Menu and the other Distros booted up properly, but when it came to the boot Ubuntu, I got these strange error messages in the Grub Menu boot process (i.e. the long UUID 524354930-342-4325- stuff). So when I install other Distros, I make sure to install Grub for those Distros on their own partition instead of the MBR. Then I would just find that Distro's menu.lst and copy over the Menu entries into Ubuntu's menu.lst (ahheeem Excuse me... The new Process Requires me to...:
Create a file in /etc/grub.d and make it executable, then run update-grub to make the changes available.) ***And it is annoying that you have to goto /etc/default/grub file to alter other information like Timeout values.
THEY SHOULD MAKE AN OPTION ON THE INSTALL SCREEN TO USE THE OLD GRUB OR THE NEW ONE. Seems it only asked on the Upgrade to 9.10 to use the old or new.

Gee Wiz, the Price of Progress is Simplicity in the Back Seat :-/

When I'm ready to install the other Distros on the 2nd Laptop, at least now I now where to put my Menu Entries. Thanks Again!!

The info below was relevant for what I wanted to do. The BOLD BLUE section is what I needed. It was found on the link syg00 posted which is...:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275


Custom User Entries (/etc/grub.d/40_custom).

* Entries to grub.cfg can be manually inserted by creating a file in the /etc/grub.d folder.
o The name of the file determines the order in the menu. 30_os-prober entries will be placed before 40_custom entries, which will be placed before 50_my-sample entries.
o Any created file must be made executable. This can be done as root by running "sudo chmod +x /etc/grub.d/filename".
o The files in the /etc/grub.d folder will be read and the contents included in grub.cfg when the "update-grub2" command is executed as root.
* A sample entry. This file creates a menu item for running the SystemRescueCD (previously installed) from a partition created on sda10. Folders and files must have been copied to the correct location in accordance with the SystemRescueCD if you wish to actually use this entry.
o
Quote:
#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.

echo "Adding SystemRescueCD" >&2
menuentry "System Rescue CD" {
set root=(hd0,10)
linux /sysrcd/rescuecd subdir=sysrcd setkmap=us
initrd /sysrcd/initram.igz
}

That is Ubuntu (Canonical, whatever) policy on this release. They have taken quite a few bugs against grub2. I have never used grub2 on a machine I care about - maybe this will push the development to get it to a point where it really is release ready.