If you would like to see how to install Burg, see my previous tutorial “Ubuntu 10.10 / 10.04 – Grub 2 with Themes” or, a more updated tutorial for installing burg on Ubuntu 11.04 (natty)

I will also make the icons I have created available for anyone who would like to use them. For this tutorial I will use Backtrack Linux, Mobiln and Chromium icons since there is nothing available for them on Burg yet (AFAIK).

Step 1: Edit the burg.cfg file to adjust the “classes”
Notice in the example below I have added the “–class moblin” argument to the entry for Moblin. We will use this later when adding the icons to our templates. You can do something similar for Chromium and Backtrack to make sure the appropriate icons appear for those entries as well.

menuentry "Moblin" --class moblin --class linux --class os --group group_/dev/sda7 {
  insmod ext2
  set root='(hd0,7)'
  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set dc4dfece-206f-4d38-b35c-6aac2fb55522
  linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-10.1.moblin2-netbook root=/dev/sda7
}

Step 2: Tell Burg the file names of your icons
Here we will edit the files in /boot/burg/themes/icons. Notice how all the files here are named. We will make our Moblin files: grey_moblin.png, large_moblin.png and small_moblin.png. We will also need to add these names into the “grey”, “hover”, “large” and “small” files.

So, we will just follow the pattern and add entries for moblin. For example, in the grey file, we add the following:

Continue doing this for all the icons you want to make, in all of the types of icon files (large, grey, hover etc).

Step 3: Creating the image
This part is a bit tricky, since burg is a bit picky when it comes to image format. The large images should be 128 x 128 pixels. The small should be 24 x 24 pixels. When you export the png file, make sure you flatten the image if you used layers and then uncheck all of the boxes. You can leave on compression if you like to reduce the file size. The most important thing to note, is greyscale is not supported, so make sure you save back into rgb for your grey files. Also, if you want to emulate how the gray images are smaller, reduce the size to 90×90 and then grow the canvas back to 128×128. (for more details see: http://code.google.com/p/burg/wiki/ThemeCustomization)

Step 4: Testing
If you like you can reboot each time to test out your changes, but the easiest way is with burg-emu. If you run this as root (or with sudo) and give it the “-D” option, you can change themes and view what each looks like with your icons.

The icons…
Here are the icons I made myself. Note: I don’t claim to have any skill in this area, so don’t blame me if they are ugly. I posted this tutorial so that hopefully some people with more skill can create some better ones! If you do, please send me an email and I’ll post them up here, or at least post a link.

  

Download
Here you can get the icons, there is one set for Chromium, one for Moblin and one for Backtract: icons.tar

Sources:
http://code.google.com/p/burg/wiki/ThemeCustomization

Its quite easy to do now in Ubuntu 11.04, really just one step:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/burg 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install burg burg-themes

However if you are using 10.04 or 10.10, follow the instructions below:

First, enable the repository for burg by editing your /etc/apt/sources.list file to include the following for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bean123ch/burg/ubuntu maverick main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bean123ch/burg/ubuntu maverick main

or use the following for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bean123ch/burg/ubuntu lucid main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bean123ch/burg/ubuntu lucid main

Next, (optional) to remove any warnings about gpg signatures, enter the following commands:

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv 55708F1EE06803C5
gpg --export --armor 55708F1EE06803C5 | sudo apt-key add -

Alternatively, if you find the pgp serer gives you an error, you can try this one:

Then we need to update apt and install burg:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install burg-pc burg burg-themes

This will prompt you to select several options along the way, so far I’ve just selected the default options since they seem to be detected from your existing grub install. The important one is to select the correct disk (Note: I’ve only tested in a non-raid system, so I don’t know how it will behave with this setup).

On the next restart, we should see a graphical grub menu, something like this:

Ubuntu 10.04 with Graphical Grub Template

By default you will probably get the ubuntu template, and you can change the template by pressing ‘t’ during the grub screen. It should also remember which one was last selected.

Note: I have experienced some problems with a fresh install of ubuntu 10.04 and SLI video cards. Burg’s graphics mode seems to confuse ubuntu and it gets stuck on boot. If this happens, you can boot in recovery mode and install the restricted nvidia driver. Then on next boot everything should be fine.

Note 2: Occasionally, when Ubuntu updates, grub may install over your burg installation. In order to get burg back, you need to issue the following command:

where /dev/sda is the partition you want to install burg onto.

Note 3: You might find you have some extra entries that you want to remove, for example the recovery entries or whatever else. You can either edit the burg.cfg file directly located at /boot/burg/burg.cfg and or you can edit the files in /etc/default/burg and /etc/burg.d/. If you use the second choice, you will need to run:

in order to regenerate the new burg.cfg file.

Sources:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Burg
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9231199