I first read about the BURG on Lifehacker and it sounded very exciting, but the installation sounded too difficult and I didn’t bother at the time. Luckily the day after they wrote about Burg Manager a graphical way to install and configure BURG. To install I just ran the following commands:
First I added the repository to the list: (it says Lucid but it works fine on my Maverick system)
echo "deb http://www.sourceslist.eu/repo/ubuntu lucid main non-free" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
Then I added the gpg key:
wget http://www.sourceslist.eu/?download=public.key -O- | sudo apt-key add
and finally I updated the repositories and install Burg-Manager. It should fetch you all the needed dependencies as well:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install burg-manager
This also installs an entry in the gnome-menu for BUC, a Burg Manager dependency for the interface I believe, which I recommend you to hide via alacarte (just use Alt+F2).
Burg-Manager doesn’t load very quickly bit it runs fine once it has so just give it some time (that makes it sound slower than it is).
Burg Manager has six tabs along the top and six button-links at the bottom and while I haven’t clicked any of the links I find tabs very useful.
There’s a Burg-Installer tab which provides installation and restoration options as well as burg-emu. Burg-emu is used to emulate the boot screen so you don’t have to reboot every time you install a new burg theme. You can change resolution, theme, and folding (by pressing R, T and F respectively) from burg-emu as well as from the actual boot screen so that is very handy. Burg-emu is quite fast by the way. The folding option I mentioned before decides whether or not to show all instances of Linux, ie. all kernel and recovery versions or just the most recent kernel. Depending on the theme there will be text to indicate these.
<This post might get updated if I get the time>
