missing GRUB_TIMEOUT -> TypeError: expected string or buffer

[Marco Rodrigues]

Startupmanager is crashing on start with following error messages :

Generating grub.cfg ...
Found background image: Lake_mapourika_NZ1.tga
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.34-1-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.34-1-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.34
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.34
Found Microsoft Windows XP Professionnel on /dev/sdb1
Found Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (10.04) on /dev/sdc12
Found Debian GNU/Linux (squeeze/sid) on /dev/sdc6
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sdd1
done
Grub2 detected
Usplash detected
Splashy not detected
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/startupmanager", line 54, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/sbin/startupmanager", line 51, in main
    SumGui()
  File "/usr/share/startupmanager/gtk_frontend.py", line 193, in
__init__
    self.setup_widgets()
  File "/usr/share/startupmanager/gtk_frontend.py", line 202, in
setup_widgets
    self.set_shared_grub_widgets()
  File "/usr/share/startupmanager/gtk_frontend.py", line 223, in
set_shared_grub_widgets
    self.timeout_spinner.set_value(self.grub.get_timeout())
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/bootconfig/grub.py", line 91, in
get_timeout
    timeout = utils.extract_number(line)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/bootconfig/utils.py", line 64, in
extract_number
    match = number_filter.search(line)
TypeError: expected string or buffer

Solution:

Add this line:

GRUB_TIMEOUT=5

(or similar) to the config.