Ubuntu users can now get a gorgeous new boot screen complete with animated menus, icons and themes, all thanks to Burg.
Canonical has made a number of significant changes to Ubuntu’s Gnome interface to make it more visually appealing to its users. However these changes have not reflected on Grub, the default bootloader. This is prettly lame as Grub is usually the first interface of Ubuntu, that users come to notice and to be frank it is not a pretty sight, even if you happen to add a background image to it. The arrival of Grub 2 hasn’t changed the bling factor either.
A new program called Burg happens to bring a workaround to it. Burg is a boot loader based on Grub and happens to have the style factor that Grub was lacking while maintaining the former’s positives.
To install Burg in your Ubuntu
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bean123ch/burg
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install burg burg-themes
After that is done you must select the drive where Burg should reside. For us it was sda, so
sudo burg-install /dev/sda
Make sure that you do
sudo update-burg
Now onto the real deal. Following are a few themes of Burg we liked
Try the following command
burg-emu
which is a cool feature to emulate Burg on the desktop. You can get a feel of Burg before actually rebooting. Selecting a new theme is easy. Just press F2 or T. There is also a nifty little option to change the resolution of the boot screen which looks really good.
Check out the official website to learn more about the project. http://code.google.com/p/burg/
Be very cautious while hacking Grub since a wrong configuration can disable your system. So make sure all essential data is backed up before trying Burg.
