h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi, I'm new to Linux and my brother's just installed Linux Mandrake 8 on our PC. He's dual booted it because there's stuff on Windows which doesn't run Linux. When the PC starts it does the usual beeping stuff and then goes to a screen to select the OS. The default is Linux and it start automatically after about 5secs. How can I change the default? I like Linux but use Windows more so I would prefer it so start Windows by default.

Is there a way to change it? I've looked around but I don't have a clue what I'm doing with Linux so I wondered if you could help.

I would guess that the boot manager is lilo, so you need to use linuxconf to reconfigure which one is the default.

you can probably also do it by directly editing /etc/lilo.conf and setting default to the name of your windows label, followed by typing lilo to update the boot record.

in both cases you need to be logged in as root.

I hope this helps.

Mandrake's Control Centre has a place to modify your LILO config using a friendlyish graphical interface as well.