LinuxTent

How many times were you in a position in which you needed to merge, or reduce the size of some .pdf files ? If you are using a Linux distribution, then you can rely on some simple command-line instructions to allow you to do so easily.

First, in order to start editing the pdf files, you have to install two packages, namely Ghostscript and PDFTK. Now, in order to merge the two files enter the following in the terminal:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=firstANDsecond.pdf -dBATCH first.pdf second.pdf

Notice the “AND” between the first and second files.

Now, in order to reduce the size of the pdf files, you will have to type the following in the terminal:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

I hope this post is helpful.

Have you ever been in need of converting a jpg file to a pdf file or the other way around? Well, I have recently.

Under Linux, all you have to do is to open up a terminal and type:

convert oldfile.jpg newfile.pdf

Is this not beautiful ?

Once you have laser network printer without any upper limit, your appetite of reading will start to increase. Within one month my office converted to a mess of articles, papers, books, and problems. However, Wikipedia is still my favorite source of reading. In Wikipedia no more fear to read more about anything you want or you do not; everything is explained by clicking on the new term that frightened you. Wikiing becomes a trend which is being included in new and special gadgets like Kindle. Moreover, such luxury is not available everywhere and having Internet while you are in a bus is far from being achieved in the near future [at least in TRNC].

I searched for a long time for a solution to make Wikipedia printed articles more elegant and practical. For example, if you want to print the printable version of the USA article this will cost you 47 page ! Changing the printing font size in Firefox browser helps. However, the printed article structure is far from being elegant: you have many white space areas and a photo or table may occupy consecutive pages in ugly and scattered way.

Apparently, there is no available firefox addons that can change the style of wikipedia article to suitable format. I think CSS and the new web fonts can be in great help [I am not sure]. PediaPress made good efforts with Wikimedia to make a new extension that allow you to collect the articles you want to be printed in one pdf file. You can also order a printed copy from pediapress. This extension which is called [collection] or [wiki-to-print] is enabled in English Wikibooks, French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English wikipedias. According to scalability issues this extension is not available directly in English Wikipedia. You can use the extension in English Wikipedia in one of these ways:

1. Collection extension is available to logged in users of English Wikiepedia. Using this solution:
   USA artcile printed in 44 pages with images in one column , the file size is 8 MB.
2. Use the pedia button in the collection extension. Using this solution:
   USA article printed in 26 pages without images in one column. The file size is 581KB
   

Moreover, I found superior solution to print wikipedia articles. Prince provide neat conversion method for HTML, XML files that generates pdf files. The software is cross platform and has a cli. Running the following command generates a pdf file for the USA article in 28 pages with images in 2 columns. The file size is 1.3MB.

rami@rami-desktop:~$ prince --no-author-style
-s http://www.princexml.com/howcome2008/wikipedia/wiki2.css
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usa -o usa.pdf

I used the prince software to print the wikipedia article on Neural Networks. Once Shariq saw the output, he said it is like a conference paper. Mustafa replied that it is even in a better quality.

If you are getting this error “Call Failed: Problem with Audio Playback” every time you try to make a call with Skype, first check that your microphone is working properly, you can do that by going to the Sound Recorded in your menu, on Gnome, it is Application=>Sound and Video=> Sound Recorder.

If it is working fine and you are still getting the same error just remove pulseaudio,


sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio


I hope this solves the problem, it worked with me on three different machines with different hardware.

ENJOY!

When you want to format a certain partition, first you need to know the label of the partition (for more information about this go here)

To that enter this command in your terminal,
df
under “Filesystem” you will find the label you want, and under “Mounted on” you will find the mounting point.
Now to format it you have to unmount it first :

sudo umount "Mount Point"

Then you can format it, there are different commands for formatting depending on which filesystem (FAT, Ext2,Ext3, Ext4, … etc) , for example lets say i want to format my flash memory stick which is under the filesystem label /dev/sdb1 , it is mounted on /media/disk, and I want to format it ext2 i will do this

sudo umount /media/disk
sudo mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb1

ENJOY!

Eps files are outdated formats, designed to be included in other ps or pdf files. However, printing such files will produce white pages to overcome this problem I find this solution.

printing normal documents from terminal
lpr filename -H printerServerIPAddress:printerServerPort

to be sure that you server is running a printer server

eid@eid-laptop:~/Desktop$ nmap eid-desktop
Starting Nmap 4.53 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2008-11-28 16:51 EET
Interesting ports on eid-desktop.lan (192.168.1.64):
Not shown: 1708 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open http
139/tcp open netbios-ssn
445/tcp open microsoft-ds
631/tcp open ipp
5900/tcp open vnc
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.083 seconds

you can note that printer server is running on port 631.

To print EPS file run this command

(cat file.eps; echo showpage) | lpr -H printerServerIPAddress:printerServerPort
in my case
(cat dsdv.eps; echo showpage) | lpr -H eid-desktop:631

Running Matlab in linux is as easy as windows, but if you are running compiz you will miss the icons in matlab !!!
To solve that you have many options

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Cygwin is a POSIX emulator layer for windows, it can be very handy for running most of Linux useful tools !, I had a long struggle installing Linux on my machine because all my HDDs are dynamic! (which is a big pain in the ass, luckily Linux now support those drives) so I had to find an alternative, and that was Cygwin.
I used it to run some tools such as NS2 network emulator and SSH, I thought I’d take this a step further and run a Linux desktop on it to make it more user friendly, finding gnome libraries was a hopeless case ! so i went for KDE, and I thought sharing the experience would be useful for the fact that finding a way to do it was really annoying :S, so here you go, the steps:
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What you have to do if you install the vga driver but it does not work?
Its so simple you have to enable it . To do so, just follow the following,

System->Administration->Hardware Drivers

You might need to restart.

Have Fun

To Install graphics drivers on ubuntu.
You need to install the driver and the configuration tool. To do that, just type the following in a terminal window:
sudo apt-get install "drive-name" " configuration-tool"
You need to change “drive-name” and “configuration-tool” according to what you have.

If you don’t know the name of your graphics card, check it here:
lspci

In my case it was Nvidia so i changed “driver-name” to nvidia-glx and “configuration-tool” to vividia-setting.
For ATI cards , you can use xrog-driver-fglrx and fglrx-control

After installation, you need do some changes on the “xrog.conf” file .Use the following command to open the file:

sudo gedit /etc/x11/xrog.conf

restart your computer
have fun