BURG if you didn’t notice is GRUB backwards and actually stands for “Brand-new Universal loadeR from GRUB” which was probably decided a while after picking the letters.. Basically though it’s a much nicer looking alternative to the very dated looking GRUB bootloader.
Installation
Until only recently it’s seemed far too much hassle of installing something which only gets displayed for a couple of seconds at boot and isn’t seen again unless something goes wrong, but now that a PPA has been created for it (for Lucid anyway) it seems like its worth the very little bother.
First add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bean123ch/burg
Now type the following to install the loader, emulator and some themes:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install burg-pc burg-themes burg-emu
You’ll be prompted to do some configuration settings in order for it to install, for these I just hit enter for each with the default to options however make sure to double check!
Now that’s done try rebooting and you should now see a slightly different screen? If so you can get on to tweaking it to get it to look even nicer :)
Tweaking
Themes:
When on the new shiny bootloader hit the ‘T’ button to load a new popup menu which allows you to toggle between themes without the need to restart so pick a favourite (mine are Radiance and Sora Clean.)
Clean Up The Boot List:
If you’re like me and have a bunch of old kernels still cramming up your boot screen you might want to get rid of them, it’s easy enough just make sure to note down your current version and the older versions which you can see on the loader (the newest version will have the highest number). My versions were 2.6.32-22 and 2.6.32-21, so I wanted to remove the later and here’s how to do that:
Open Synaptic Package Manager (System-> Administration->Synaptic Package Manager)
search for the version you want to remove (eg mine was 2.6.32-21) right click on the checked ones and “Mark for Complete Removal”, if you are at all unsure about which version to remove it’s probably best you just leave it or ask someone to check.
Now in order to update BURG to notify changes have been made, run:
sudo update-burg
Set the BURG Screen Resolution:
Very simple to do, note down your screen resolution (you should be able to find that under System->Preferences->Monitors under Resolution) now you want to edit the following file and change the default size to the one that matches your screens.
sudo gedit /boot/burg/burg.cfg
Find the following line and replace the 640×480 with your resolution (for example I had to change mine to 1440×900)
set gfxmode=640×480
Save and close this file and you should be done.
If you want to try customising BURG more or if you’re having some problems you should check out their very useful help page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Burg
Update:
Over at OMG! Ubuntu! they have found an even nice looking theme, so make sure to check that out: link
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