Get more from your grubby boot menu
Booting your PC is something that just happens and most people don’t even give it a second thought, unless it’s brain-numbingly slow or something goes about as wrong as Brexit has. This is largely as most distributions, when you install them, automatically create the partitions and sets up any dual-boot required. Beyond that, most users leave it be and get on with their lives.
This makes the thing we call GRUB and generally the entire boot process a mystery to most people. In this article, you can start clearing the fog a little bit and see what you can do to improve things. If dual-booting isn’t on your agenda, you still have other interesting options to explore along expanding your knowledge.
If you’re wondering what it stands for, GNU GRUB is the GRand Unified Bootloader. The bootloader is the software glue that sits between the BIOS/UEFI firmware that kickstarts your PC hardware into life and the Linux (or Windows) kernel being run – started by the bootloader – and then the Process ID One (PiD1) ‘init’, very often Systemd.
Depending on what you are after, you may need to compile (don’t panic!) GRUB or even the kernel. One interesting feature to consider is EFI_STUB, which makes the kernel a boot loader that you can set to be the first to load. That will be faster, but you will be unable to dual-boot your machine, which can make life complicated. Single-booting is not necessarily bad though – have you decided to stick with Linux or do you need other operating systems? If you only have one or two applications that need Windows, you can run that in a virtual machine.
