No Way Know How

I'd scanned 16 pages of a mortgage application form using xsane and I wanted to whack them all together in a single pdf. Googling revealed a consensus that the solution involved using ImageMagick . Lazily I just tried sudo apt-get install imagemagick , which did something , but I'm not sure what. Maybe provided some sort of infrastructure for imagemagick, if the description of the packages I checked on synaptic later are anything to go by. Anyway, I fucked about a bit and ended up compiling it and I was missing dependencies which I eventually got from following this advice : sudo apt-get install imagemagick libmagick++-dev And suddenly the starting instructions I was following worked: convert mortgage *. png mortgage_application . pdf Gave me the single document I needed. Pages all in the wrong order of course.  [EDIT] The files needed leading numbers in the name to order properly in the folder. I tried to use a for loop to rename each in turn ( f or v in mortgag...

I have an old desktop pc in the office running as a server and I usually just mess about on it via SSH. Couple of times I've wanted to move files about and I always manage to do it eventually with putty's psftp function, but I always forget how it works and have to search up how to do it again... SO. http://www.msci.memphis.edu/~simmonsj/c4262/notes/psftp.html  is the source of the following information. Navigating the remote directory is pretty much just the usual shell commands (without useful filename expansion).  Navigating the local pc (the bit that confused me) requires commands like:  lpwd (local present working directory) lcd e:\ (change local working directory - to a USB on Windows in this case) !dir (list contents of local working directory) put filename (puts a copy of the file named in the remote working directory) Because I'm getting slightly to grips with how this stuff works I did put -r in this case because I was copy...

I was pretty happy using CLI for navigation and file-y stuff when I was first recommended cdparanoia, but the prospect of using it to rip CDs seemed too perverse. I've just had another go, and it's super easy. cdparanoia -B is the key command. It'll rip all tracks from the current disc drive to the current working folder. then $ lame track01.cdda.wav to encode a track as mp3. To do this for all the tracks in the folder: $ for t in track{01..18}*.wav; do lame $t; done and then it's just a matter of rm *wav to get rid of those. Though should I maybe back up the wav files to an external hdd though? decisions. Oh, and here's where I go the straight answers above.

I'd used LVM to set up logical volumes as per this guide on my last crunchbang install. I created root, home and swap volumes for my main distro and then later (as per Funishment post) set up similar volumes to dual-boot Arch. The snapshot bit looked beyond me at the time so I never got round to that. Now I'm confident enough to get GRML installed to USB and use that, with LVM in the command line (as opposed to the system-config-lvm gui) to follow the instructions here . So, there's not much more to say, beyond following the instructions on the thread. Initially I thought about using LVM to shrink the crunchbang root volume, which I've crazily allocated nearly 20GB after running out of space for the OS last time and having to grow it with LVM. Shat it, though. the thought of messing up the root partition while trying to find a way to back up the root partition was too scary. So I went ahead and allocated 4G to the snap volume instead of the 1G used in the example...

I've not kept track of all the system changes I've made here. I probably missed out some stuff where I removed decorations from all my windows and then set shortcuts via keybindings. Anyway, nothing too stressful. The Arch partitions on my laptop are being ignored completely so I think it's time to give up on that project and try something a little less overwhelming. Archbang maybe, if that's not too close to Arch. Maybe something else, I dunno. I even sort of fancy Mint, maybe. Do I? Torn. At any rate, before I stary messing around with partitions and installations and whatnot again, I really felt I ought to make a proper system backup. I really don't fancy going though the whole setup process again and pawing through this blog to figure out that Citrix bullshit for a third time. Oh Christ, and Steam. brrrr. So I've spent a few days looking over the LVM monumental post on the crunchbang forums and finally felt confident in pursuing the snapshop and ar...

So I got #! up and running with Steam, Citrix Receiver, Dropbox, Skype etc. all the things I needed. Got Handbrake to backup my DVDs to hard drive - and it works. Got them playing through OpenElec on the Raspberry Pi (Anynet+ CEC isn't working, but there's a new HDMI cable in the post that'll sort that I'm sure). Twiddles thumbs. Maybe it's time to have a stab at Arch, eh? * Set up new logical volumes on the existing volume group from #! using sudo system-config-lvm (feel slightly bad about using the GUI) * Write ISO to USB, install using the beginner's guide . * Make sure to add the right hooks for LVM * Struggle slightly with understanding how to add new OS to GRUB, but sort it out reasonably quickly * Boot Arch, install X.org, install xfce. huh. not so scary. almost... disappointingly straightforward. Obviously I'm realising I have a slightly unhealthy addiction here.

Been all round the houses with this one. long story short, this is the route to take . Just get the current script from the guithub page and amend any paths in the instructions accordingly.