Setting GRUB default timeout duration
 

Hi, everybody. I tried searching LQ for help on the following, but the search is taking forever, even when restricted to only within the Newbie forum...so here goes...

I'm currently dual-booting between WinXP Home and FC5, which I like very much. I haven't completely weaned myself off XP yet, and GRUB defaults to FC5.

The problem is, GRUB gives me a "window" of only two seconds to interrupt the bootloading sequence before defaulting. There've been a couple of times when I've had my head turned and didn't hit the keyboard in time, and then I have to wait for the computer to catch up with my frantic three-finger salutes (Ctrl-Alt-Del), stop loading Linux, and let me try again.

I imagine there's some file somewhere where I can change a "2" to a "10" to get a ten-second window. So, where is it? Is this something that I can somehow set from within GRUB, or to I go to Linux and edit a file? If so, which one?

Thx in advance,

The file to edit is called grub.conf (or menu.lst) and is (usually) located in /boot/grub. The line you're looking for is "timeout=x", where x is the number of seconds before booting the default entry.

The file you want is /boot/grub/menu.lst

and the line is
timeout x
where x is the number of secon ds delay

you will probably need to be root to edit or even view this file