I have several distros installed right now (openSUSE 10.3/11.0(JAD)/11.0, UbuntuStudio, Fedora) and consequently I have several layers of grub menus (ie, I choose UbuntuStudio from the main openSUSE grub menu, and I get Ubuntu’s grub menu). I would like my main install’s (oS 11.0) grub menu to boot all my distros directly without going through their individual grub menu. Can I just delete the individual menu.1st’s? Or is their a better way?
Yes, you can move the entries from the chained GRUB menu.lst to the SUSE GRUB menu.lst. Just do it one menu.lst at a time and don’t remove the chained GRUB entry until you get it to work.
Somebody else also did the same thing and had to remove the savedefault directive in the 64 Studio stanza because that’s not used in SUSE GRUB. After that it worked fine.
What is most common is to use a converged menu.lst, in one of two ways. One is direct booting, where the stanza’s are like your home distro with root and kernel commands that point to the other distro partitions and specific kernel. In the Debian grub set up (and Ubuntu’s), the script will create a single menu.lst set up this way. The other approach is to chainload each distro, which requires installing grub to each distro’s root or boot partition boot sector. The direct method will boot the distro, well, directly, while the chainload method transfers control to the other grub and it loads its menu.lst menu and goes from there. In openSUSE YaST Boot Loader there is an option under Other to propose a converged menu.lst, which would use the direct method (of course, this can be easily edited). IME the Debian script works better, but I maintain my menu.lst by hand.