Startup-Manager: A Utility to Edit GRUB Boot-loader related Options Easily in Ubuntu

Startup-Manager is a graphical tool that's written in the GTK+ toolkit which was developed for letting the users of Debian GNU/Linux OS to easily edit few "boot-related" options such as GRUB menu delay, Splash screen, other security related settings, etc.

But since Ubuntu is based on the awesome Debian ;-), SturtupManager can also be installed and used to edit few of those settings in Ubuntu as well. The reason I said, "few of those settings" is because, as you can see with the below screenshots, the first one is the original application image running in Debian with lots of settings (tabs) but the second one is from my Ubuntu 11.04 Laptop and has only two tabs thus fewer options than in Debian.

It's running in Debian

As you can see, somewhat "reduced" under Ubuntu...

But still, even though it's a bit "restricted" under Ubuntu, if you want to do things like...

*. Choose the default selected menu in GRUB boot-loader.

*. Change GRUB boot-loader's resolution and color depths such as 8/16 and 24 bits (although Ubuntu uses a bit ugly GRUB loader theme, without any background at all, I don't think changing the color-depth is gonna help :D).

*. Change time-out in seconds.

*. Enable/disable boot-splash (once enabled, this will display a splash screen after the default Ubuntu boot-logo is closed and just before loading the GDM log-in window).

*. Enable/disable boot-text (I don't think this applies to the recent versions of Ubuntu since they all come with text outputs disabled while booting by default).

*. Create a boot-able Floppy "image" (accessed via the "advanced" tab):

This is hardly ever used by computer users these days, since the Floppy-disk drive is a hardware that's almost dead. Although in the "not that long ago" past :), creating a Floppy image was quite heavily used in case of your Boot-loader was corrupted or something bad happens to it, etc.

Well that's about it folks. You can install startup-manager in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

Once installed, press "Alt" + "F2" keys on your keyboard and use the below command to launch it.

startupmanager

Although it can be a bit tempting but I humble suggest you not to enable the "splash screen", not because it'll do any bad to the booting process, but having it disabled (Ubuntu come with it disabled by default) it should help to speed-up the boot-up times, just a little bit though :).

Anyhow, it's your choice mate!. Good luck.