I'm having trouble with my current bootloader GRUB on Ubuntu 12.04. Sometimes it takes forever too boot, other times it wont find the kernel image. My system uses UEFI to boot, is there a UEFI alternative to GRUB?
I've written a set of Web pages on this topic:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/
Briefly, boot loader options are:
Any of these programs can load a kernel into memory and execute it. In addition, there are separate boot managers available, which present menus of boot options:
These are usually paired with the EFI stub loader, which lacks a menu of its own. (GRUB 2, GRUB Legacy, and ELILO all have their own built-in boot menus, although ELILO's can only select between Linux kernels, not between kernels and other OSes.) If you like, though, you could use a boot manager with GRUB or ELILO, and use the boot manager just to select between Linux and another OS.
As a general rule, people who switch away from GRUB tend to gravitate toward the EFI stub loader, usually in conjunction with rEFInd, or occasionally gummiboot. The EFI stub loader is included in 3.3.0 and later kernels, so you don't need to do anything special to install it. Assuming you can boot into Linux, installing rEFInd should be easy -- just install the Debian package on its download page. gummiboot is harder because the developers don't make a Debian package (or any sort of binary) available. rEFIt is no longer being maintained (rEFInd is a fork of rEFIt, though). In practice, EFI bugs can sometimes complicate matters, no matter what software you select.
