That boring white on black GRUB boot menu you get when you switch on your computer is a bit, well, boring, isn’t it?

Thankfully, there’s an easy way to change it if you go into your GRUB configuration file. A word of warning, though, editing the GRUB configuration file without knowing what you’re doing can result in bad things happening and can cause you to not be able to boot your system. Tread with caution.

The configuration file will be located at either /boot/grub/menu.lst or /etc/grub.conf. Open it up, as root, in your favourite text editor.

The line we need to add is the color command. It works like this:

color normal [highlight]

The normal colour, is quite obviously, the colour that will be used normally, and the highlight colour will be the colour when that row is selected to show that it is selected.

For both normal and highlight, though, you can separate the foreground and background colours with a /.

An example of this is if we wanted the following - the normal colour is cyan on blue, and the highlight is white on blue. The code we’d need is this:

Read the rest of Colour your GRUB boot menu

Providing graphical feedback in the form of dialogue boxes when you’re writing a shell script isn’t really that easy to do yourself. If you’re a KDE user, though, and want to write a shell script that gives you feedback in the form of one of these.

This could be really useful if you want to set up a script that you want to be able to run graphically, for example, by making a link on your desktop to run it.

So how does this all work? The secret is a program called KDialog. It should be installed with recent KDE versions, but if not, install the package kdialog from your package manager.

Making a simple dialogue box appear is pretty simple. To use the example above, I just needed this command:

$ kdialog --title FOSSwire --msgbox "FOSSwire is awesome"

And that’s it. Note the double quotes around the main message - if you have any spaces or special characters in either the title or the main text, you’ll need to quote it to prevent the shell choking on the space and thinking it’s another argument.

As well as msgbox, there are also other types of dialogue you can experiment with creating. For example, you can use a text box to get textual input from the user, which is returned as the application’s output. This means you can use it to gather some information from the user and use that later in the script.

$ kdialog --title FOSSwire --textinputbox "Enter some text"

Also available are options for creating yes/no dialogues, error boxes and much more. To find out exactly which type of alert would best suit you, simply run kdialog without any options to see the list of options.

And have fun GUI-fying your scripts with KDE!

Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 3 today, and the Linux efforts behind it are starting to show even more. This release, being a beta, is surprisingly stable. Here’s the killer that makes this beta release amazing: more GTK support.

Look at those tabs. They match perfectly with the default Clearlooks theme. It isn’t true GTK like Epiphany, but it sure looks like it now. Instead of using custom icons by default, Firefox will now obey your theme settings. For those icons that don’t have an appropriate GTK equivalent, Tango icons will be used. Check out the popup menu at the right. Notice all of the visual cues for the menu items now? It’s GTK heaven.

Thought the Location bar was smart in the previous beta? Well, guess what, it’s even smarter now; so much that it is beginning to get creepy. Think of a page title but not the URL itself? No problem, Firefox 3 has you covered.

Other additions to this release include a refined bookmarks manager, a ton of bugfixes (the usual) and UI enhancements in several areas. Overall, it seems like the Mozilla team is really looking to get rid of the ugly fat image of Firefox on most systems, and streamline the animal into something much faster, especially in the area of Linux. Much of the newfound Linux support is all thanks to you users out there who tested the nightly builds and commented (and complained) on them. See, you can make a difference!