Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS= Davrom Consulting Newsletter - Issue # 46 - Dated: 6 May 2010 From the desk of David Clark Time for another newsletter according to some prompters who haven't seen one for a while. Thanks for the continued support and encouragement - you know who you are. Is it just me or are on-line "search engines" search results becoming less relevant and more advertisement focussed when searching for key words - being that only one or two of your search words are actually on the pages the search returns? Support for me lately has been working mainly with using Linux utilities to manipulate text to use and combine with PDF files. One example is taking multi-page PDF documents and combining them into one document for e-mailing and filing. Another project has been filling out PDF forms with text generated by an application to produce completed PDF documents ready to use (e-mail, print, file). Quite amazing technology to turn plain old text print outs and text based export files into PDF documents complete with all the visual niceties. Goodbye pre-printed stationary and brings you into more of the much desired paperless office (I know, does it truly exist?). This kind of solution also helps extend the life of the good old reliable applications that have helped businesses run day after day for past 10-20 years. As always I recommend keeping the text copies as well to safeguard access to the information beyond todays solutions. Other than this, lots of Linux based e-mail and Internet work to do. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote From our TellDavrom logs: 707 days of uptime - can only be a Linux/UNIX system. VirtualBox For those familiar with VMware, VirtualBox offers an alternative to running an operating system on your Linux, Mac or Windows PC within your current operating system. As the name implies, VirtualBox runs as a standard application on your operating system and it allows you to install another operating system to live within your current operating system (eg., Windows running on Linux). Given I live on the upgrade path of Fedora Linux, updates and upgrades often leave me with having to recompile bits to get the traditional VMware to run on the newly updated system - which sometimes leaves things broken for a time. Having to urgently support a customer via Windows XP but not wanting to risk wrecking my Windows support PC by making it again the victim to some third party network interface, VirtualBox came to the rescue. Within the time it takes to install Windows XP I was able to have a fully functioning XP machine running on my Fedora Linux desktop. I could then back this up and could care less if the third party network software wrecked the entire Windows networking setup - I could just restore over the top of it and start again. VirtualBox is easy to install and comes with a host of environment adjustment capabilities that you come to expect from virtualisation software. I see VirtualBox as more for the personal desktop user but could not see why you couldn't run a production server operating system inside it. One key point I saw stated was that given Windows can be spied upon by spyware while using things like Internet banking, VirtualBox would allow you to run your banking and Internet secure transacting on a Linux VirtualBox on your Windows PC. You can download VirtualBox and use it freely as it is Open Source software: http://www.virtualbox.org From the Trenches Some comic or not so comic relief from the support days gone by. Still following the coffee theme in I.T from the last newsletter.... I once went for an interview with a leading UNIX (actually Xenix) distributor and was interviewed by the owner/director. He took me to the cafe dispenser in the office and proceeded to make my coffee just like his - with _five_ (5!!!) turns of the coffee dispenser button. I love coffee but don't need to be awake for 150 years. After making the technical adjustments myself to the coffee: heaps of milk and sugar to kill the bitterness, the interview proceeded and I somehow managed to drink the cup of coffee while feeling as though it was going right through my being and even polishing my shoes as well. The upside was I did get the job and with the new found courage as an employee I advised my boss that he is never to make a cup of coffee for any prospective employee again. From memory he quibbed that it was some kind of test. The things we endure to achieve the next step in our work life. Tech Tip While on the trail of PDF this month, there can be an issue with attempting to print a PDF document from the Linux command line using the CUPS printing subsystem. You can find that the document may not quite fit the page it prints out. Often depending on the printer driver installed on Linux you should be able to print a PDF document to a printer using: lp -o media=a4 -o fit-to-page inv100501.pdf This tells CUPS the form size (in this case A4) and the fit-to-page option seems to be an update to the fitplot option which seems to fix some of the page alignment issues. Back to Newsletters 
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