For the occasional reboot to Windows, I found I was wasting a lot of time saving my work, closing my programs, rebooting, and then later reopening everything again. On the advice of Clarke Brunsdon, I started using suspend to disk AKA hibernate, which allowed me to switch to Windows, while saving my running programs and setup under Linux.
I then searched to remove the task of powering on the computer after it has suspended and then picking Windows from the Grub boot menu, which I often forgot to do.
Setting the selected operating system under grub is relatively straightforward using the grub-set-default command.
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#/boot/grub/menu.lst # change the default boot option to saved default saved # (0) Linux title Linux # ... # add savedefault 0 to the end of each boot option, which sets the default back to Linux savedefault 0 # (1) Windows title Linux # ... savedefault 0 |
The next step was automatically rebooting which was accomplished using the sparsely documented shutdown method = reboot option of s2disk
My final windows reboot script is
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#!/bin/sh sudo grub-set-default 2 # here '2' is whichever option is Windows sudo s2disk -P 'shutdown method = reboot' |
Which takes me from Linux to Windows, and back to my saved workspace on reboot.