How do I remove items from the GRUB menu?

Question

While booting the system shows two impressions (ubuntu.2.6.38-11-generic and ubuntu 2.6.38-11-generic) are shown in the boot menu. How can I merge them or get rid of the older version?

Answer 1

These are old kernels that your system keeps around in case you have a problem with your current kernel. In general, it's a good idea to keep at least one previous kernel around to boot into if necessary.

The easiest way to get rid of older kernels is to open Synaptic Package Manager and search for packages beginning with linux-image which also contain a version number.

I believe there's also a program called Computer Janitor that will clean up old kernels for you, so you could try that as well.

You can also install the Grub Customizer package to choose what menu entries you have at boot. This way you can keep some old kernels, but just not seem them in the menu.

See here for more details.

Answer 2

here is a rough outline of what I did, careful as I am no expert in linux, be sure you know what you are doing and have backed up any files you are modifying.

gedit /boot/grub/grub.cfg

then find the entries you want to keep, we will highlight and copy them

cd /etc/grub.d
ls

you'll see a list of files like 10_linux and 30_os-prober

sudo chmod -x 10_linux

this will stop form auto adding all the linux entries into the grub boot menu.

gksudo gedit 40_custom

open the custom boot menu file, then go back to grub.cfg (which should still be open in gedit), and copy the entries you want to keep... such as

menuentry "My Default Karmic" {
  set root=(hd0,1)
  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set cb201140-52f8-4449-9a95-749b27b58ce8
  linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-11-generic root=UUID=cb201140-52f8-4449-9a95-749b27b58ce8 ro quiet splash
  initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-11-generic
}

paste them into 40_custom, and then save it.

sudo chmod 755 40_custom

makes it executable, then finally we update grub which will change the grub.cfg file:

sudo update-grub

Now, BEWARE, if you update your kernel or OS, your boot menu probably will not update... you'll have to do that manually. But doing this procedure will let you customize the boot menu a bit more, such as remove the kernel version and just put the ubuntu name... i.e. Ubuntu Lucid 10.04, etc...

Hope someone finds this helpful, as it took me a while to figure out... didn't see this solution anywhere...