Tag Archives: Linux

How to split or merge PDF documents in Linux?

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PDF-ShufflerMost of the times when I had to split or merge a couple of PDF documents I had to use command line tools, which was kind of boring, since it isn’t a tool that I use often so what used to happend was that I always forgot the syntax usage.

Today was one of those times that I needed to merge two PDF documents so I’ve looked around and found PDF-Shuffler which is a small python-gtk application, which helps you to merge or split PDF documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive GUI. It is a frontend for python-pyPdf.

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Liferea – A simple and free Gtk desktop news aggregator!

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Today I bring you  Liferea, a simple and free Gtk desktop news aggregator for online news feeds.

For a long time now I have been looking for something like this to help me to keep track on the blogs that I like to read often. Since I’ve got back on blogging I’ve found it to be the right moment to search for a similar tool.

Although I’m only using it for a couple of days, Liferea seems a nice piece of software, it’s incredibly simple, fast and it also has some nice features.

You should definitely give it a try.

Xubuntu 8.10

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Great news, Xubuntu 8.10 was released last week.

Although I’m a big fan of Fedora I wasn’t very happy with the lack of speed while running a few applications, then I’ve decided to try a different Linux distribution.

The first one that I thought it would be a good alternative was Ubuntu, but after reading a couple of threads, I’ve finally decided to get Xubuntu.

Xubuntu is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system and it uses the Xfce desktop environment.

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Looking for Diagram, Workflow and Chart designer.

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At the moment I need to write a couple of work flows and charts so I can be able to demonstrate the usage of a tool I’m currently developing.

The only tool that I knew that could do this kind of work (on Linux) was Dia. Although it has a lot of features it seems (I’m not sure, since I’ve only used it once) that there aren’t much sheets available to download, and I don’t like the ones provided by default.

Later I’ve decided to look for another program, and I’ve found Kivio an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application integrated in The KOffice Project.

Kivio provides by default a couple of nice sheets, so let’s hope it works as expected.

How to add new levels to Pingus?

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Last week I was looking for games developed with ClanLib and I found this one. For those of you who don’t know what Pingus is all about check it’s entry at Wikipedia, it reminds me of Lemmings.

Actually I’m not a games guy, but from time to time I like to play some classic games (they’re my favorites), and this one fits in this category, it is a very simple game with good story and good graphics.

At this time I finished the “Tutorial Island” (you’ll know what that is after you play the game) and unfortunately that is the end of the game.

Suddenly I got the feeling “Only this? No more levels? I want more…”, and I did a couple of searches and found some how to add new levels to the game.

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Gnome took the weekend off…

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Last week I’ve been installing and uninstalling stuff from my laptop trying to enable my webcam on Linux, unfortunately with no success.

If anyone has some informations on it tell me something, it’s a Lifetech FlexCam 760MP.

In the meanwhile last Friday I went to Évora and turned my laptop off.

Yesterday I got back, turned my laptop on, and for my surprise Gnome was gone too.. maybe he decided to take the weekend off.

It seems that something got screwed up while I was trying to enable my webcam and I didn’t noticed it till then.

Fedora 9 (Sulphur)

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That’s right new version of Fedora is out, this time it’s codename is Sulphur.

Yesterday I’ve downloaded it and burned it into a DVD. A couple of minutes ago I tried to install it with no success, since it kept giving me kernel panic when booting:

VFS: Cannot open root device “<NULL>” or unknown-block(253,0)
Please append a correct “root=” boot option.

Since I haven’t much time to spend on this at the moment, I decided to re-install Fedora 8. For my surprise it kept crashing on /sbin/loader while booting from DVD.

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emesene

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Till a couple of minutes ago I was using aMSN, now I changed to emesene.

One thing that made me change was the annoying “titles”. If you are listing your contacts by group it will slow down your client, this only happends in 0.97 version, in older versions I didn’t noticed this reaction.

About emesene I’m happy with it, it has the regular features that an MSN client should have and a couple of new ones. I can say that it is a Windows MSN clone without the crappy features.

It’s also written in Python, and that means it is portable.

ClanLib SDK

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Yesterday I started to write this post while I was “wasting” some time upgrading ClanLib to version 0.8.1 then I thought I should write something about it while it was being compiled.

The truth is that I already talked about this subject a couple of posts ago, when I wrote about “Pingus – A journey into the unknown…”, one of the games I found while searching for games developed with this great SDK.

ClanLib is the same library that me and my colleagues will use to develop our Multimedia Contents Production (MCP) project. I didn’t knew about this library until Filipe Vieira told me about it, he mentioned that we should bet on it for this project development, because it’s a very complete and clean library with lots of cool features.

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IEs4Linux

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One of the worst problems a developer can have while developing a web application is to make it compatible to the maximum browsers possible.

If you are running Linux and don’t have Microsoft Windows installed, or you have it but you don’t want to switch to it just for testing your application in Internet Explorer.

Happily you can use IEs4Linux to test your application, currently supported versions are 5, 5.5, 6 and 7 (beta).

You may read the installation instructions here.

An alternative to this is, if you have Microsoft Windows installed, it’s partition mounted and wine installed you may run the Internet Explorer that you have installed there.