Worms & WINE Are Not as Expected

Today I came across a web page with a download for the old computer game Worms 2. I recall playing this and Worms: Armageddon with my fellow residence friends when I was in University (affectionately called "rezbians"). I wondered if it could run on Linux. I know there is a web page somewhere which tells you such things.

I typed "worms wine" into Google before thinking. I got unexpected results which should (?) have been expected.

Lost Sound when Plugging in USB flash

I was playing an .avi in kaffeine, and at the same time I plugged in a 512MB USB flash drive. Immediately I lost sound in Kaffeine, though video was still playing. I check Youtube via Firefox, same thing.

I used to have a problem in Amarok where if Amarok crashed, it would mute the sound without my noticing. Thankfully I remembered to check this in Kaffeine, but that was not the problem.

I don't mess with the sound settings often, so I had a fun time trying to find them (turns out they're not in your system or settings menu... try looking for KMix in the Multimedia menu instead.)

I log on to the freenode IRC channel #kubuntu, and a couple nice folks there had some suggestions for me.

I was told to pay special attention to KMix lines: master, master mono, PCM. These were all fine (at or near the top).

(You can also open alsamixer via the command line)

alsamixer

I was then advised to restart ALSA.

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

This did not work. I tried closing all my programs which might be using sound, and running the command again. This did not work either.

I ran the command, and then rebooted. This works! Now I have my sound back.

Mounting ntfs Drives in Kubuntu

Find the device and its partition in a terminal window:

sudo fdisk -l

Bootable devices will be marked. The actual drive used to boot will have partitions split up into swap space. IDE devices often (but not always) start with 'h', SATA devices and USB flash drives start with 's'. fdisk will indicate which file format the drive is formatted in. Hard drive letters indicate a specific device (i.e. a hard drive), numbers represent different partitions used in that device. Subsequent letters indicate addtional devices, and will likely be added incrementally (for example, if you have a SATA hard drive mounted first and then attach a USB flash drive, the hard drive should be sda, and the flash drive should end up being sdb.)

Numbers indicate a partition of that particular mounted device. Linux will reserve room for swap space and a boot sector in addition to the filesystem where you will store your files.

Mount the device to a destination folder. Replace 'hda1' below with the drive you wish to mount, and change the '/home/...' directory to where you want to mount the files to (the directory in this case will act like a link or bookmark). The folder in the home user's directory will be "ubuntu" (not your computer name) if it's running off a live cd.

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /home/ubuntu/Desktop/folder -t ntfs
-o nls=utf8,umask=0222

This is for mounting ntfs drives only!

(I've found other commands to "mount an ntfs drive", but they don't seem to work.)

Jerky Video off CD .avi in Kaffiene after /hdd Permisison Problems

I've noticed sometimes when I get problems like listed earlier this day (finicky CD/DVD ejecting & unmounting permissions), I get jerky motion when I finally am able to play something like an .avi off the mounted disc. I can stop Kaffiene and even pkill it, but it still continues. The problem stops if I reboot and run the .avi off the cd/dvd again.

Any idea what's going on in the background here? Is there another process I have to kill, or do I simply have to wait a long time before jerkiness doesn't become an issue? Or is reboot the only solution?

CD Will Not Eject, Unmount

1. burned using k3b
2. still showed as blank cd-rom on desktop
3. used physical eject button on cd, closed drive after it opened
   
4. tested data on cd: cd showed up with label, file opened
5. tried to eject (gave error)
6. tried to unmount (gave error i.e. "error: kio_media_unmounthelper unmount: /media/hdd is not in fstab")
7. (light on cd-rom drive is flickering)

Solution: If I wait a couple minutes, I can then use right click->eject

I guess other apps aren't releasing permissions to the drive to preven accidental manipulation and use by other programs?

(edit: same dealie with my USB flash stick. I moved files into a directory on my desktop. Well after it was finished, I attempted to right click-> safely remove, and it gave me the same error)

PDF Manipulation; Tesseract OCR

Little bit of story to begin.

Working in a small print shop, I've had to deal with pdfs a lot more. One reason is setup: customers bring in all sorts of wonky files at the incorrect finished size and setup. Customers make files in Word, which may spontaneously change formatting (hey... how are WE supposed to know what your document is supposed to look like?) We get a lot on bands printing 11x17 posters, but they also want handbills, which are not set up. "Ready to print" is rarely the case.

Word also likes to not printed coloured backgrounds, even if you tell it to.

For pdf manipulation, I use three main tools: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat Professional, and Xerox Freeflow Makeready.

The beauty about Photoshop is that you can actually open up a PDF. It will rasterize the file (essentially "make it into a picture") , which is great if you have you're getting issues with formatting. The downside is that it rasterizes the image. Gone is the editability (is that a word?) of the PDF. Always save as a copy before working on an image!

This concept gives light to the structure of the pdf as well. PDFs are similar in concept to web pages (HTML, if you're familiar with it). The document doesn't contain an image. It is a document explaining the structure of different elements, and how they should be displayed. This is why you are able to search many pdfs.

With extended use of Freeflow, it becomes obvious too that making a document n-up (multiple copies of the same thing in a page) is a function of the markup in the PDF. If you make a document 4-up, the size of the file doesn't change (or does by a miniscule amount). However, if you make a (rasterized) image 4-up and save it as an image again, it gets much larger.

Acrobat Professional is great for some purposes, but some of the tools are clunky to use. Worse still, some tools that look intuitive to use, aren't. Furthermore, it's still buggy. Crop kind of works. The "layers" tab is essentially useless.

Freeflow has some great tools. For example, you can view the contents of a pdf in its layers, and manipulate the layers (you could insert an image which is one colour and move it to the bottom of the layers... making it the background colour). It's also really easy to make things n-up. I'm surprised I don't see this more. Computers can do math much more quickly than we can. As humans, it's not that difficult for us to do (if nice round-numbered measurements are used), but it is time consuming.

Put into perspective the hundreds/thousands of dollars these programs cost and the fact that I still have to switch between them to solve some problems, plus there are still some problems they don't solve...

A large problem I would like to solve:
Collecting some of my images together at home into pdfs. Some of these are just images, some are images of text.

Using Linux, I wasn't about run out and buy a $440 copy of Acrobat Professional. Kpdf is a great lightweight viewer, but that's about all it can do. I supposed I could use a workaround using LaTeX, OpenOffice, or ImageMagick, but that might get tedious or cumbersome. I asked on IRC about ImageMagick, but I couldn't get a definite answer.

I came across some solutions quite by accident.

PDF Hacks contained a solution. Apparently you can make all images in a directory into a pdf with ImageMagick ("hack" 48, p125).

convert -density 100 -quality 85 \ -page "800x800>" -resize "800x800>" *.jpg album.pdf

Well, that's simple. Easy to write as a shell script or program, too.

I came across Tesseract quite by accident. It happened to be a July 2007 Linux Journal article. Tesseract can take a uncompressed tif image and use OCR to port it into an actual text document. It does it with an excellent success rate (97-100%).

The author says he uses it to scan in his textbooks, so he doesn't have to lug heavy books around campus.

Plus: both ImageMagick and Tesseract are free.

Installing and Switching Between Extra Desktops / Window Managers

You don't have to commit to one Desktop style. You can install GNOME, KDE, XFCE (among others), and just switch between them.

• GNOME is the desktop used in Ubuntu.
• KDE is the desktop used in Kubuntu.
• Xfce is the desktop used in Xubuntu.

To switch between the desktops, log out. When you log back in, click the "session" button and select which window manager you want to use. Easy as pie.

To install, you can use Synaptic Package manager, or apt-get (on the command line). However, these methods don't keep track of dependencies, so it's recommended you use aptitude (on the command line) instead:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop
sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop

Link in title as always, or here.

DVD-R Discs Seem Blank After Sucessful K3B Burn

Discs burned as Data DVD with K3B defaults

1st problem: really old version on K3B

Install K3B using directions here: http://k3b.plainblack.com/installation
Make sure requirements are installed.

Great generic howto on K3B burning here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=218165&highlight=k3b+blank+dvd+after+burn

Similar problem to mine here, ... solution?
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/3010

Lost Running Applications / Programs in Toolbar

A while ago, I was adding and removing applications from the panel, and the spacing between them got all screwy. Next thing I know my list of running applications is gone.

Couldn't find it for the life of me. Gave up trying to find an answer, said "screw it", and just started using alt+tab to switch between running programs. Still annoying though.

Incidentally, I discovered if you move your mouse cursor over the title (top) of a window that's open, using mouse's scroll wheel will make you switch between the last two windows.

Anyway...

Happened to be on irc.freenode.net #kubuntu ... and someone there posted a similar problem. To get back your application list in your toolbar / panel:

1. right-click on toolbar in an empty spot
2. click "Add Applet to Panel" (this is where you say AHHHHHH!)
3. click Taskbar and OK.

Import Thunderbird Mail into Kmail

I wanted to import my messages from Thunderbird into Kmail, so I could use Kontact as my entire personal information tool. I could not find a tool anywhere in Kmail / Kontact (or even just right in Kmail) to import mail from another program. After Googling it, I found it should be in Tools -> Import Messages. The odd thing is I didn't have that menu option. Another thing to try is using a tool mozilla2kmail.pl, but that didn't work for me.

Cliff's Notes:

• make sure kmailcvt is installed. Use Synaptic Package Manager to get it.
• then in Kontact/Kmail use File -> Import Messages to import messages from Thunderbird.

Story:
Kmail 1.9.1 using KDE 3.5.2

Found some wonky directions here, but that seemed too complicated.

I looked up the Kmail (via the menus in Kontact/Kmail). The help file seemed to be out of date, web address gets rerouted here.

A bit of a beef I have with the Kontact web site is that they don't give you the current revision of the entire package, nor the current revision of the components of the package. I looked at FAQ of the Kontact page. I didn't see a link to an IRC channel, but I tried out

irc.freenode.net #kontact

The channel does exist, but appears to be a small developer's channel. No one seemed to be awake.

The aforementioned mozilla2kmail.pl script had to be run with

chmod +x mozilla2kmail.pl
sudo ./mozilla2kmail.pl

which gave an error that "./home/kat/Mail is not a directory."
To get help you need to type

./mozilla2kmail.pl --help

which is different than indicated ("mozilla2kmail --help")! This command gives me

"You need to install the perl-doc package to use this program."

I install perl-doc using Synaptic Package Manager, but I still get ". /home/kat/Mail is not a directory." after doing a "sudo ./mozilla2kmail.pl"

Did more searching and came up with the Cliff's Notes solution, which works. The only stickler is that when the import runs, it doesn't make it obvious what it wants you to open. I selected the entire mail folder (/home/kat/.thunderbird/fzcc2crp.default/Mail/) which had two folders in it: a "Local Folder" and a "pop.gmail.com folder." This seems to work.