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ovi

Member

Registered: 2026-03-29

Posts: 25  

GRUB_TIMEOUT is being ignored

I dualboot Devuan with Windows 11. I want to increase the GRUB_TIMEOUT from default 5 sec. to 10 sec.
But it doesn't make any effect, is still 5 sec.

$ cat /etc/default/grub
# If you change this file or any /etc/default/grub.d/*.cfg file,
# run 'update-grub' afterwards to update /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in these files, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT="0"
GRUB_TIMEOUT="10"
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="`( . /etc/os-release && echo ${NAME} )`"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# If your computer has multiple operating systems installed, then you
# probably want to run os-prober. However, if your computer is a host
# for guest OSes installed via LVM or raw disk devices, running
# os-prober can cause damage to those guest OSes as it mounts
# filesystems to look for things.
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER="false"

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal
#GRUB_TERMINAL="console"

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE/GOP/UGA
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `videoinfo'
GRUB_GFXMODE="1920x1080"

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID="true"

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/gigabyte/theme.txt"

I did:

$ sudo update-grub

to update the /boot/grub/grub.cfg

And is strange because if I look into /boot/grub/grub.cfg  it seems the timeout is set to 10 sec.

if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ] ; then
  set timeout=30
else
  if [ x$feature_timeout_style = xy ] ; then
    set timeout_style=menu
    set timeout=10
  # Fallback normal timeout code in case the timeout_style feature is
  # unavailable.
  else
    set timeout=10
  fi
fi

I also installed grub-customizer and installed a theme, but is the same. Is still 5 secs, even also the grub-customizer shows that the timeout is set to 10 seconds.

RedGreen925

Member

Registered: 2024-12-07

Posts: 305  

Re: GRUB_TIMEOUT is being ignored

You are lucky I would love that for my install. God damn thing always defaults to the 30 seconds in the file for me. I have this to get the 5 seconds I want.

root@9600k:~# cat bin/fix_timeout_grub.sh 
#!/bin/bash

# A script to fix the 30 second timeout Devuan defaults to with grub.

sed -i "s/timeout=30/timeout=5/g" /boot/grub/grub.cfg

It must be done after any update-grub has been run or it goes back to the old behaviour. Edit the file after any update has been done to get what you want, at least this is how it works for me.