PPSPPA (Sisa Pepejal) goverment agency uses Ubuntu in its office branches

PPSPPA or Perbandanan Pengurusan Sisa Pepejal dan Pembersihan Awam is a government agency in Malaysia that uses Ubuntu in its offices. PPSPPA has branches in every state in the Peninsular, including the HQ and training center in Putrajaya, all of it runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating system.

PPSPPA Logo Sisa Pepejal

As such, PPSPPA only uses hardware which runs in Ubuntu, including printers, scanners and drawing tablets. Which is a good sign for vendors to start releasing their hardware drivers for open source operating systems.

Hopefully other government agency would follow suit and use free and open source operating system instead the one that requires millions RM of site license. It is not the license that concerns us, but it is the grip of monopoly of a single corporation has over governments and economy that is most concerning.

Quick Way to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release is just around the corner!

Here’s how to upgrade Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat using bash shell

sudo sed -i 's/lucid/maverick/g' /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

sudo aptitude install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade -d

That’s it! Happy upgrading!

Putting Colors to GRUB Bootloader menu

Some distro like Ubuntu installs a plain white on black color scheme of GRUB on your computer. Nothing wrong with it, only it look like as if the computer is running with a monochrome monitor. Rest assured, there are ways you can do to spruce up your GRUB menu

Grub Ubuntu mypapit.net

Add colors to GRUB menu
The easiest way is to add colors to the plain vanilla grub menu. First edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst using your favorite editor.

Then, uncomment the line
# color cyan/blue white/blue

GRUB Color Explanation
cyan/blue = color of the GRUB menu
whte/blue = color when a particular menu item is highlighted

It follows this format : foreground/background … cyan/blue

Finally, save the file and reboot. You shall see your new colorize GRUB menu. Other color combination you might want to try are :

# black
# blue
# green
# cyan
# red
# magenta
# brown
# light-gray

Foreground color :
# dark-gray
# light-blue
# light-green
# light-cyan
# light-red
# light-magenta
# yellow
# white

GRUB boot menu similar to OpenSUSE and Linspire
Alternatively you can use themeable GRUB boot menu similar to those of OpenSUSE and Linspire bootloader. To do this you need to install gfxboot and grub-gfxboot package.

Follow the instruction from ubuntuforums.org, Howto : GfxBoot ( Grub menu like suse )

Ubuntu Mobile is going to be announced in June !

Good news everyone, Canonical is going to announce the latest edition of Ubuntu line up, Ubuntu Mobile next month. Ubuntu Mobile is an Ubuntu edition which runs on a new type of mobile computers called Mobile Internet Devices.

Some features of Ubuntu Mobile device are :

  • GPS
  • Digital TV
  • Emails, Instant Messaging, Web Browsing
  • Multimedia Player
  • VoIP applications
  • Integration with various social webapps (MySpace, Youtube, Facebook)
ubuntu logo mypapit.net

However it is stll remain to be seen whether Ubuntu Mobile going to released with its own SDK. I’ll be really excited if they release Ubuntu Mobile in my place.

Source : Underexposed – CNET News.com