Notes in the Aether

I had a need to change the boot order in GRUB to hide the fact that Linux is present on a laptop I am giving to a relative. When Windows borks, not if, I want to be able to help her rescue her machine over the phone or possibly even remotely. So while I’m refreshing myself on the wonders of GRUB2, I thought I’d make some notes to collect a good explanation of GRUB here while I’m at it.

When adding groups or such to your account, instead of ‘logging out and back’ in just initiate a switch-user to your username. Part of moving to a new user is accepting an entirely new set of user-account elements. Like groups, command-line editors, etc.

From the wiki on Grub Setup

• GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX Entries on this line are added to the end of the ‘linux’ command line (GRUB legacy’s “kernel” line) for both normal and recovery modes. It is used to pass options to the kernel.
• GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" This line imports any entries to the end of the ‘linux’ line (GRUB legacy’s “kernel” line). The entries are appended to the end of the normal mode only. To view a black screen with boot processes displayed in text, remove “quiet splash”. To see the grub splash image plus a condensed text output, use “splash”.

How to check the current distribution release.

cat /etc/*release or cat /etc/issue* or cat /proc/version.
lsb_release can also be used, but in some distributions there are no lsb modules are installed making it less useful.