grub-choose-default
I like to test more than one operating system at the same time so that i can give a better support to the users. Being an IT person and if you have more than 100 users it would be difficult to spare any time even to waste on booting the system more than two three times in a day and then wait for it to come to the boot menu and select the appropriate operating system to boot into and test the desired things. Isn’t it annoying when you want to reboot from Linux into Windows or vice-versa, and you have to wait for the machine to shut down, the BIOS to initialize just so that you can now select the OS that you want to boot into? grub-choose-default gives you a GUI that you can use to easily select the next default for grub and you can go and grab a snack while your computer reboots without having to wait for anything. It’s a very simple program that just reads your grub menu entries and then lets you click on the one you want to be the next default.
How It Works
Since grub2 reached version 1.98, setting the default boot entry through the "grub environment" is supported. From Linux, the grub-set-default command is available again, just as before with grub-legacy. Under Windows grub’s code is used to edit the environment directly.
Cross Platform
grub-choose-default is available both for Linux and Windows. It should also work on other flavors also, but has not been tested.
Under Linux it reads /boot/grub/grub.cfg and sets your choice using grub-set-default.
Under Windows you need to get access to your Linux /boot. If you are running ext2/3, then you can use Ext2IFS, which gives you access to your ext2/3 partitions as regular drives under Windows. grub-set-default currently needs this and thus does not work with /boot on reiserfs or other file systems (unless someone can point me to a similar FS driver as Ext2IFS).
Then grub-choose-default searches all your drives for boot/grub/grub.cfg or a grub/grub.cfg. The grub directory can be specified in the configuration file, which is located in the Profile folder’s "Application Data" subdirectory grub-choose-default. Add the line grub_dir=D:\grub" to the end of the file, and remember to escape backslashes.
Prerequisites
- GTK 2.16+
- GIO (on Windows)
- Python (for building from source)
Download
The development version can be found at http://github.com/squisher/grub-choose-default .
Note: This program is only for the current grub version (1.98+), and does not work with grub-legacy (0.xx). Older grub-choose-default versions work with grub-legacy, see GrubChooseDefaultLegacy. grub-choose-default is released under the GNU GPL v2. The NSIS installer script is using GNU GPL v3, and the waf scripts the EXPAT license.
