Automatically Booting Two Installed OSes (Windows 10 & Ubuntu 20.04) on a Dell Latitude 5411 Laptop

Automatically Booting Two Installed OSes (Windows 10 & Ubuntu 20.04) on a Dell Latitude 5411 Laptop

In this article, we will discuss the process of automatically booting two installed operating systems (Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04) on a Dell Latitude 5411 laptop. Both operating systems are installed on separate encrypted partitions, and the user wants to always boot into Linux.

Prerequisites

• A Dell Latitude 5411 laptop with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 installed on separate encrypted partitions.
• Basic knowledge of command line interface and text editing.

Bootloader Configuration

The bootloader is responsible for loading the operating system when the computer starts up. In this case, we will be using the GRUB bootloader, which is the default bootloader for Ubuntu. To configure GRUB to always boot into Linux, we need to edit the GRUB configuration file.

Editing GRUB Configuration File

To edit the GRUB configuration file, open the terminal and type the following command:

This will open the GRUB configuration file in a text editor. Look for the following line:

This line specifies the default operating system to boot. Change the value to saved as shown below:

Next, look for the following line:

This line specifies the style of the GRUB menu. Change the value to menu as shown below:

This will display the GRUB menu for a few seconds before automatically booting into Linux. Save and close the file by pressing Ctrl+X, then Y, and then Enter.

Updating GRUB

After editing the GRUB configuration file, we need to update GRUB to apply the changes. Type the following command in the terminal:

This will update the GRUB bootloader and apply the changes we made to the configuration file.

Setting Default Operating System

Now that we have configured GRUB to always display the menu, we need to set the default operating system to boot. To do this, we will use the grub-set-default command.

To set Windows 10 as the default operating system, type the following command in the terminal:

To set Ubuntu 20.04 as the default operating system, type the following command in the terminal:

In this case, we want to always boot into Linux, so we will set Ubuntu 20.04 as the default operating system.

• We have discussed the process of automatically booting two installed operating systems (Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04) on a Dell Latitude 5411 laptop.
• We have configured the GRUB bootloader to always display the menu and set Ubuntu 20.04 as the default operating system.

References

• Ubuntu GRUB2 documentation
• GRUB manual - Simple configuration