[Updated to include a response from corenominal himself with one final fix some may need. -Peng]
I usually don’t look at the Grub kernel list when I boot my Ubuntu box, but last month I noticed that all of the kernels in my list showed “crunchbang” rather than “Ubuntu 9.04″. I did some searching and found a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about the issue and dstew made a great comment that helped me track down the problem.
It turns out it came from Philip Newborough’s PPA , which I have in my Third-party sources list. Philip, aka corenominal, has some great packages in his PPA, some of which Nanci has written about previously. If you have his PPA in your /etc/apt/sources.list you may have gotten update notices for grub or one of the other apps he has packages for. If you accepted his grub package you may have unconsciously had your /boot/grub/menu.list updated.
This is because Philip is one of the driving forces behind CrunchBang Linux, a GNU/Linux distro based on Ubuntu but designed to be faster, not to mention prettier (as their wiki states, “Finally, unlike Ubuntu, CrunchBang Linux isn’t brown
” ) and has several CrunchBang packages in his PPA. While I can’t confirm this with 100% certainty, I suspect the change got made when I accepted grub - 0.97-29ubuntu50-1crunchbang1 as an update.
The solution
There are a few things you can do to get rid of the “CrunchBang” on your boot menu. The first is to roll back grub to the previous, official Ubuntu Jaunty, package. Open Synaptic (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager), and once it opens do a search for Grub (Edit > Search or Ctrl-F).
Once you find grub select it and to go Package > Force Version. You will want to select the highest version that doesn’t include “crunchbang”. On my system the version I want is version 0.97-29ubuntu53 (jaunty), but your system may be different. Now apply the change you made by either clicking the icon on the toolbar (it’s a green check mark, but your theme may be different), using Edit > Apply Marked Changes, or by using the Ctrl-P shortcut. Once the change has been made, go ahead and lock the version on grub by selecting the package and using Edit > Lock Version. That way you won’t be prompted to apply that upgrade again in the future. At this point I strongly recommend that you disable his PPA until you know there’s an update in his packages that you know you need. While it may not be needed, I recommend at least logging out and back in to finalize the changes you just made, although you will need to reboot to actually see if the changes show up in your boot list.
Unfortunately I’m seeing that this process doesn’t actually undo the changes to your /boot/grub/menu.list, the file used to present you with the kernel options at boot time. If you have the application Starup Manager (SUM), you can you can run that to at least verify that the kernel carries the identifier “Ubuntu 9.04″ rather than “CrunchBang”. When I opened /boot/grub/menu.list in the Text Editor (gedit) to see if the change had been made my kernel list still showed “CrunchBang” (which is what prompted this post in the first place), but once I ran SUM it showed that my kernels did carry the “Ubuntu 9.04″ name. Once I closed SUM the menu.list, which I still had open in gedit, had been updated on my hard drive, and sure enough the kernels now showed the identifier “Ubuntu 9.04″. I’m not sure what exactly happened, but I’m glad it did.
If that doesn’t resolve things for you, or if you don’t use SUM, you will need to open /boot/grub/menu.list in a text editor with administrative permissions (backing up the current file first!) by running this in a terminal window:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.list
Scroll down to where you see ## ## End Default Options ##. Below that is the list of kernels available for booting into. Change the title on each kernel listing to change “CrunchBang” to “Ubuntu 9.04″, or whatever you want the title to read, then save the file and close the window. The next time you boot your computer look at the kernel menu and you should see that the options no longer carry the moniker CrunchBag.
I have emailed Philip about this, and if he gives me information to pass along I’ll add it.
Update 2:30 PM: I got a response from Philip and he didn’t realize putting the packages on his PPAwould cause problems, and he’s pulled them. As far as this particular issue, you definitely want to roll back to the official version of grub, as detailed above. For after that I’ll quote Philip’s email.
Regarding fixing up your grub boot list, if you have already rolled back the package, you should be able to run the following command to remove the CrunchBang references:
sudo update-grub
Apologies again for the boob.
That should take care of any issues you’re still experiencing. If anyone runs into Philip someplace, I’d buy him a pint. He’s definitely earned it for all the good work he’s done for the Linux community, whether you use any package from his PPA or not.
Thanks again, Philip. You rock.
