Philip's Blog

Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala) comes with Grub 2 (1.97~beta4). Some improvement:
- Universal support for UUIDs
- Scripting support including conditional statements and functions
- Boots from LVM, RAID and ext4 directly
- Non-X86 platform support (such as PowerPC)
So, lets see how we can make some default grub-legacy changes in grub 2.

Change screen resolution (for grub-menu):
gap@devBox:~$ sudo vi /etc/default/grub
Now you can edit the GRUB_GFXMODE (uncomment and change VBE Mode)
GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024
You can show your supported VBE modes when you hit c in the grub menue, and run vbeinfo in the appearing console.

Change the tty resolution:
Even if my laptop has a intel grafic chip, im using the uvesafb kernel module. These, because you have much more work with the intelfb module.
So, you have to load the uvesafb, and you should also be sure its not blacklisted.
# write the name of your module in this file:
sudo vi /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
# uncomment the line if the modul is blacklisted:
sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf
# update initramfs
sudo update-initramfs -u
# install v86d (if you use uvesafb)
sudo apt-get install v86d
After that we can edit GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="video=uvesafb:mode_option=1600x1200-24"
After a
sudo update-grub
sudo reboot
Youre done.