Ubuntu 10.04 is "mostly" great

I have been using Ubuntu 10.04 on my Thinkpad for about a week now. I have to say, there are great enhancements on the Operating System. For one thing, the boot-up time is just about unbelievable. To shut-down, suspend or shut-down your machine have all become rather synonymous. The GUI has also be enhanced considerably and I find myself quite happy to start working on my laptop if you get me !! Moreover, I believe it is ever easier at this point to work with scanners and printers and other external hardware.

The other day, I needed to scan a paper, and whilst I was at my friends house, we could not use his laptop (which still had Windows XP installed) to connect to the scanner since the scanner driver CD was lost. We hooked the scanner to my laptop, et voilà !! I could scan my document and everything went superbly.

However, life is not all beer and skittles (not for all of us anyway) !! There are some problems when dealing with the new OS. For one thing, there are some problems with the new version of Firefox: When using Firefox with any Extensions, I could not use my keyboard to move around. copy and paste or use the tab key. I believe there is a fault in some upgrade file.

All in all, it is quite interesting to see that Ubuntu is becoming a more mature and more user friendly. My mother, recently quite IT-illiterate currently uses Ubuntu to, inter alia, surf the net and listen to music !! This, in my view means that with time, Ubuntu, and other types of Linux distributions will become more user friendly, easier to use and maintain their main allure as well, namely: no license fee, and most importantly, no vendor-lock.

How to convert other image-format files to pfd format and vice versa under Linux

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 ? :)

How to merge or reduce pdf file-size under Linux Distributions

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.