[conspire] Once upon a time /boot/grub/menu.lst sailed away

[roger at rogerchrisman.com]

I just learned this today. Old news you probably already know but I
didn't... if I read it here then I forgot it... in short:

I wanted to clean up my boot menu list in Ubuntu 10.4 to remove old
kernal boot lines I don't want in there any more, and

/boot/grub/menu.lst _used_ to be the place to do that but is _gone_
now, sailed away under the bridge of time as of Ubuntu 9.10 aparently.

So I Googled it and found this How To Geek page that explained how to:

Clean Up the New Ubuntu Grub2 Boot Menu
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/17787/clean-up-the-new-ubuntu-grub2-boot-menu/

It recommends, to remove old kernel lines from Grub2 boot menu, use
Synaptic package manager to remove the old kernel packages that you
don't want any more and Grub2 will automatically remove the
corresponding boot menu lines.

Eg:
"When [Synaptic] opens up, type the kernel version that you want to
remove in the Quick search text field. The first few numbers should
suffice."
"For each of the entries associated with the old kernel (e.g.
linux-headers-2.6.32-21 and linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic),
right-click and choose Mark for Complete Removal."

All I want to do is remove the excess old kernal boot lines that have
been accumulating in my boot menu and okay, I don't mind removing the
excess kernel files themselves, too. So I tried it -- I removed the
old kernel versions with Synaptic. Done*. Boot menu nice and tidy
again. because

* True story, in which Synaptic fails first time round, maybe due to
bad sectors on hard drive, in another story... tomorrow.

If you only have one OS on your computer you might not see the Grub2
boot menu on start up unless you hold down the _shift_ key at boot up.
But that's not my case because I keep another OS, Windows XP, as a
boot option on this old laptop so that my son can run his Chinese
homework CD and such things that only run in MS Windows.

Finally, How To Geek says regarding Grub2 boot menu, "If you need more
fine-grained control, or want to remove entries that are not kernel
versions, you must change the files located in /etc/grub.d." I have
not looked in there however.

Roger :-)
Palo Alto
Hope this helps someone -- when in doubt, be curious -- Google.