I saw earlier warnings against using grub-customizer too late and ran the program. Apparently it’s not compatible with modern Fedora which uses BLS instead to populate the boot menu.
I didn’t change or save anything, but i noticed that on first start the program was already issuing a grub2-mkconfig in the console, which seemed worrying.
After closing the program and rebooting to check, i found that some (EFI) boot options had been changed such as the boot order and the fast boot option. So apparently the program had made some unwanted changes to the system.
I was wondering if i need to repair anything to get my installation back to the original state? Or can i assume that the next time a kernel updates comes along the system will automatically run the correct commands and generate a proper boot setup again?
Yes, unfortunately there are a fair number of ‘credible’ articles going around that tell people how simple and effective the program is, and since it’s natively available in Fedora it’s easy to assume that running the thing once to see how it looks isn’t a big risk.
Once it started to issue grub commands right on the first launch i knew it was a poorly written program and i needed to bail, but unfortunately it had already made some changes to the system by that time.
Hopefully grid-customizer will be pulled from the repositories soon.
There are safer ways to change boot settings.
I was mainly looking for a simple way to lower the resolution or increase the font size of the grub menu, since it’s tiny on my 4k laptop screen. If you have other (safe) suggestions for that please do let me know.
Thanks Joe, my main worry is that those kinds of threads often come with a lot of warnings about editing the right/wrong system files, issuing the right commands and inadvertently breaking boot (which someone in that thread appears to do while testing).
So it doesn’t fall in the category of simple/safe solutions for me yet…
Thanks Villy! All looks well after issuing those commands, the config files seem to be intact.
I think the only changes that grub-customizer managed to make to the system were environment parameters such as the default boot entry and the fastboot option. The actual kernel entries were left unscathed, which seems the most important.
The fastboot option skips the graphical boot splash screen, so the display of the manufacturer logo and the OS logo and spinner. It just shows a black screen instead without a timeout, which is kind of tricky if it happens inadvertently because your first reaction is that your machine is broken / doesn’t boot…
To finish up this topic, this is what i ended up doing to increase the font size in the grub boot menu and the console (TTY). There are other ways that could be more streamlined, i’ll keep an eye out for those, but this gave the intended result.
For grub, i changed the display mode from text to gfx, and set a safe resolution:
grub-customizer has been known to remove or overwrite files in grub.d, so this is to verify that the files exist and are owned by the correct system package grub2-tools. All looks well.
(the 00_tuned file is copied by the tuned package from /usr/share/tuned/grub2/, so that’s also fine)
!
