BURKS is the Brighton University Resource Kit for Students, a non-profit collection of useful resources for students of Computing who do not have (or cannot afford) an Internet connection. The resources include compilers, tutorials and reference manuals for dozens of different programming languages, a dictionary of computing with over 13,000 entries, a copy of the Mandrake 8.0 Linux distribution, a vast amount of useful software, information about the Internet itself, and much more.
The BURKS project is now in its 6th year and the collection has grown from about 450M in the first edition to about 2.5G in the current edition. New editions are prepared every August in readiness for the start of the UK academic year. As the collection has grown from one CD to four CDs the price has increased due to the extra manufacturing costs involved, although it is still below the £7.00 cover price of the first edition. However, I'm glad to say that the price per megabyte has dropped every single year since the project began.
Due to the ever-expanding size of the collection, BURKS is being made available on DVD for the first time. I'm planning to release future versions on DVD only; my intention is that this will be the last CD-based edition.
The entire collection is also available online at the BURKS website (http://burks.bton.ac.uk/). Have a look there for news, errata and ordering information.
To make it clear what the links on the index pages refer to, I've used the following symbols throughout:
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| This symbol indicates that the associated link will take you to a document on the CD. Note that many of the documents and software packages on this CD are updated regularly, so if you want to be sure of getting the latest version, you'll need to check the relevant home site. A link to the home site for each document is included in its index entry. |
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| This symbol indicates that clicking on the associated link will install some software onto your hard disk. See the notes on installing software for more information. Again, updates happen frequently, so check the home site if you want the latest version of a particular software package. |
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| This symbol indicates that the associated link will take you to a resource elsewhere on the World-Wide Web. You will need an Internet connection to make use of links marked like this. |
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| This symbol indicates that the associated link will take you to another section of the CD. |
The Internet is a rapidly changing place. You may find that some documents have links to sites or documents that no longer exist. Although I checked the links in all the index files on the CD before it went to press, that doesn't mean they'll still be there now. If necessary, use a search engine to track down any lost documents.
Note that documents and software provided on this CD are all subject to copyright by their respective authors. See the CD licensing information for more details. If you want to redistribute anything from this CD elsewhere, make sure that you check the copyright notice first. If in doubt, or if there is no explicit copyright notice, contact the document's author to ask permission. Note that it is extremely unlikely that you will be permitted to redistribute anything for profit.
There's nearly 2 gigabytes of software and documentation in this collection. This means that it's quite likely that any information or tools that you want will be here somewhere. People have sometimes contacted me to recommend that I include some useful document or software package in the next edition and have been amazed when I point out that's it's already included. So, what's the best way to find what you need in this mass of information?
You can configure BURKS to use your own browser and a local server (see "Using your own browser" for details). If you do this, there is a simple search engine you can use to search the CD for specific words and phrases. A link to this appears at the right-hand end of the main index bar at the top of the browser window when you are using the main server.
Another solution is to use the main document index to search for relevant document titles. You can use your browser's "Find" command (usually on the "Edit" menu, or press control-F) to search for keywords. The document index is actually a permuted index, so every document appears under every significant word in its title (so "Object-Oriented Analysis and Design" also appears as "Analysis and Design, Object-Oriented" and "Design, Object-Oriented Analysis and...".
For software, there's an alphabetical catalogue. Again, you can use your browser's "Find" command to search for key words (e.g. search for "MP3" if you want to see what MP3 software is available).
In the case of Linux, a lot of information is provided in the How-To documents. Go to section 5 (the single list of HOWTOs) or section 6 (the single list of mini-HOWTOs) and use your browser's "Find" command to search for relevant documents.
This CD includes an automated installation utility, so all you should need to do is click on a link to a software package to launch the installation utility and then follow the instructions it provides. If you need more information, see the section on installing software.
You will sometimes need to change some of your system settings after
the software has been installed (e.g. adding the name of the installation
directory to your path, or setting the CLASSPATH variable used
by the Java runtime system. You should always read the documentation
included with the software you install to find out what to do and how to use
it.
To modify your system settings under Windows 95 or 98, just look in the
root directory on drive C: (double click on "My Computer", then
double click on the icon for drive C:) and find the file
AUTOEXEC.BAT (which may just appear as AUTOEXEC).
Click the right mouse button on the icon for this file, and a menu should
appear. Select "Edit" from the menu. There will probably be a line in this
file which looks something like this (and if there isn't, you can add one
yourself):
SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMANDS
This gives a list of directories which will be searched if necessary to
locate program files. If you need to add a new directory name to this, append
a semicolon (;) and the name of the directory. If the directory name includes
any spaces or any other characters apart from letters and digits, enclose it
in quotes ("..."). For example, to add the directory C:\Program
Files\Foo\bin to your path, modify the line above to read:
SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMANDS;"C:\Program Files\Foo\bin"
If you need to set any other variable (e.g. CLASSPATH) add a line which looks like this:
SET CLASSPATH=.;C:\JRE1.3\lib\rt.jar
Again, this is a list of directories and files which will be searched
when the Java runtime system is looking for Java class files. The first
entry (".") means "look in the current directory first".
The second entry is the full pathname of the "rt.jar" file
(which in this case is specified to be in the directory "lib"
inside the directory "JRE1.3" on drive C:).
When you've finished, save the modified file and reboot your machine for the changes to take effect.
For more information about modifying environment variables in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, look here.
BURKS creates two directories on your system: a BURKS subdirectory in your Windows directory (typically C:\WINDOWS\BURKS) and a BURKS subdirectory in the directory used for temporary files (e.g. C:\TEMP\BURKS). To uninstall BURKS, all you need to do is delete these two directories. BURKS does not alter your registry in any way, so you don't need to do anything else.