Philippines 2010 Elections and Ubuntu

The Philippines 2010 Election will be using an electronic counting machine for the first time. The Linux-powered machines were provided by Smartmatic and the ROMs are managed by (and supposedly programmed in) Ubuntu.

Yes, Ubuntu has a major role to play, albeit obscurely, in our country’s history.

Moving on to Evolution

After using Thunderbird for years, I’ve finally decided to move on to Evolution. It’s a lighter and responsive alternative to Thunderbird. Besides, the desktop and Empathy integration’s awesome, not to mention Contacts sync via Ubuntu One.

BENECO uses Ubuntu

The Benguet Electric Cooperative, Inc. (BENECO) is now using Ubuntu full-time under the Operations and Maintenance Department (OMD). Granted we only have 3 confirmed installs, we determined it’s the best and most effective course of action for its users. There are 2 more file (Samba) servers purportedly running on Red Hat, but I still haven’t seen it so the report remains unconfirmed.


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My Lucid Experience

Lucid Lynx is scheduled to be released next month, but that didn’t stop me from upgrading (clean install). This is a nice opportunity for me to test it out, as well as contribute by reporting any bugs I might stumble upon.

The default theme is refreshingly minimalistic – my wife commented it’s very inviting. There’s also a noticeable performance improvement as compared to Karmic Koala (note: I’m using a netbook here!). Applications responds quicker and the system boots and shuts down faster. As a plus, all my hardware works flawlessly.
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Smart’s ZTE MF627 on Karmic

This is my last night on Karmic Koala ‘coz tonight, I’ll be upgrading to Lucid.  So I decided to try out my 3G stick from Smart and test it on my buggy Koala (MSI Wind issues mostly). Whaddaya know? It still works.. although I’m not quite sure if it works out of the box or because I still have Liam Green-Hughes’ usb-modeswitch and zte-mf627-switch old Jaunty packages.

The speed can’t compare to my broadband DSL, but still acceptable if I’m on the road.