Boot Menu and Recovery

Boot Menu and Dual Boot

Other operating systems

After each update, RakuOS looks for other operating systems on your disks and adds them to the boot menu, above "UEFI Firmware Settings". It finds:

  • Windows, and other systems os-prober recognizes;
  • other Linux distributions, BSD and boot managers that have a bootloader on an EFI partition: their shim or GRUB, systemd-boot, FreeBSD's loader, rEFInd and so on.

Other Linux distributions are started through their own bootloader, because starting their kernels directly from RakuOS's GRUB doesn't work with Secure Boot on. With Secure Boot on, a bootloader that isn't signed is marked "(needs Secure Boot off)": it only starts once you turn Secure Boot off.

If you install another system and don't want to wait for the next update:

sudo /usr/libexec/rakuos/os-entries --dry-run    # shows what it found and would write
sudo /usr/libexec/rakuos/os-entries              # adds it now; it shows at the next boot

journalctl -b -u rakuos-os-entries shows what the last automatic run found (it runs 2 minutes after the first boot of a new image).

If a disk isn't found one time, the existing entries are kept.

Don't run grub2-mkconfig

RakuOS's GRUB setup is fixed at install time and kept up to date by RakuOS itself. grub2-mkconfig, update-grub and grub2-install don't apply and can break booting. Don't edit /boot/grub2/grub.cfg or os-prober.cfg either.

To add your own GRUB entries, put them in /boot/grub2/custom.cfg, outside the blocks marked ### BEGIN RakuOS … / ### END RakuOS …. Anything outside those blocks is kept. (/boot is read-only; remount it to edit: sudo mount -o remount,rw /boot, and back with ro afterwards.)

GRUB theme and password

The RakuOS GRUB theme is installed with each update, so a new theme shows on the first boot of the new image.

A GRUB password set with sudo grub2-setpassword is kept across updates.

Bootloader updates

RakuOS keeps the shim and GRUB on your EFI partition up to date from the system image, at boot. It only ever upgrades, so a rollback never downgrades them. With Secure Boot on, it only updates when your firmware trusts Microsoft's 2023 UEFI certificate; otherwise it skips and says so in its log, and a firmware update (fwupdmgr update, or your PC maker's tool) fixes that.

journalctl -b -u rakuos-bootloader-update    # what it did on this boot