Lubuntu 14.04 - No grub screen. Need to Ctrl Alt Del to reach grub

Question

Turning the machine on or rebooting leads to a black screen right after the brand logo (Acer) splash screen. Nothing happens until I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, which kind of reboots but shows the grub menu. At this point I can choose the system and boot normally. The system works fine, but having to do this each time I turn the computer on is not nice. Related question without answer.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It is likely that your /etc/default/grub file contains these two lines:

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true

Can't understand why they leave these options there, since they are deprecated in favor of GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE according to info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'.

Commenting out these two options make the grub menu appears right away when booting (idea taken from here). This leads to another problem that initially I didn't have: after choosing the option from grub, the system hangs in a black screen. To solve this one, go back to /etc/default/grub and change the line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"

Besides commenting out the two hidden timeout options mentioned, I also added GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden and set GRUB_TIMEOUT=2. This way the grub menu is hidden but if during the 2 seconds interval you press ESC you get the menu back. Otherwise you boot to your default option.

UPDATE: You might leave quiet splash before nomodeset to keep the good looking boot process:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

The nomodeset introduced a new problem for me: can't control brightness anymore with fn keys. Once I figure a solution I'll update this.