How To Change Boot Order/Set Default Boot OS In Ubuntu 14.10/15.04 / Linux Mint Or Other Derivatives

If you are dual booting then probably you have suffered through a problem of booting into wrong OS or secondary OS because it's on top of grub menu. Recently somebody asked this to me that How can he boot into his primary OS by default. So I thought to write a tutorial. If you want to boot into your preferred OS without always pressing 'down arrow key' when you turn on your computer then read further for the solution. Let's go ahead!

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YouNex asked me yesterday that how can he boot his primary OS automatically unless he wants to boot his secondary OS. Well, this simply means everything should be same, but the primary OS should be on top so that grub boots the top (selected by default) after some seconds. In his case, he was using Ubuntu as primary OS and Windows as secondary OS. 

So now all we need to do is that we need to change the grub menu order and take the primary OS on top of other. I did face this problem when I triple boot Ubuntu 15.04, Windows and ChelvetOS. ChelvetOS was on top but I was using Ubuntu as primary OS. Whenever I missed arrowing down to Ubuntu, It boot ChelvetOS which is frustrating. And here is how I solved this problem.

Change Grub Menu Boot Order In Ubuntu 14.10 / 15.04 / Linux Mint Or Other Derivatives

You can install grub customizer tool in Ubuntu to customize grub menu. Add the following PPA from terminal, update local repositories and install grub customizer.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

How To Use Grub Customizer In Linux

Grub Customizer is a small tool and once installation finished, launch it from menu or dash. This needs the password to start. Type password and there you go!

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Now the following window will come up. Notice all the entries of boot menu. We want to change the order of the entries. Select the entry that you want to take up or down then press 'UP' or 'DOWN' arrows from tool menu. It's simple. Isn't it? Now once you've done customizing grub menu, don't forget to save settings. 

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How To Set Default Boot With Linux Terminal

$ sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
OR use nano terminal based test editor
$ sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Change GRUB_DEFAULT=0 to GRUB_DEFAULT=saved. It makes easy to later change default OS.

Now update the grub menu from terminal.

$ sudo grub-set-default 3

Remember 3 is the entry number and the first entry is 0.

[How To] Change Grub Menu Colors In Linux

With Grub customizer tool you can also customize grub menu background color, font color and background highlight color. To do so move to 'Appearance settings' and customize colors of grub menu. 

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If you don't want to use any third party tool like grub customizer then you can also change default boot from terminal and gedit text editor or nano, command line text editor. 

Open terminal (CTRL + ALT + T) and edit '/etc/default/grub'.

Now whenever you will boot your computer, you don't need to press down arrow key to your primary OS. It'll be booting automatically.

Now you can set the default OS with the following command followed by the number of the entry in the grub menu.

$ sudo update-grub