notes

If you are running a Drupal multi-site installation, and the sequence tables are shared, then here's an admonition: take real care of the changed prefix for each shared database. Cross check on the sequence tables if you ever had to rename the database or just the unshared tables. For instance, [dbprefix_dbname] becomes [dbprefixnew_dbname] The first thing you have to do is go check the sequence table and change the values manually on the new sequence table entries corresponding to the database appropriately.

Nothing new in Openoffice crashing on your Linux installation. It does, most of the times :P But for the users who rely on SCIM (Stanadard Chinese Input Method) for Input in their regional language, Openoffice is completely unusable as of now on Ubuntu. It never takes off from the splash screen that appears. Turns out that Openoffice.org doesn't like the GTK_IM_MODULE set to scim. There is a work around, though. But not so convenient one.

I've had to remind myself this every time I upgrade the distributions on my Workstations and notebook.

Found this on a forum. Very useful in converting Tiffs to PDF. tiff2ps -h 8.5 -w 11 *.tif > tiffs.ps ps2pdfwr -g7920x6120 tiffs.ps OR $ for f in *.tiff; do convert [options] $f $f.ps; done $ convert *.ps merged.ps $ ps2pdf merged.pdf For the first method, you'll need Ghostscript Utilities installed. For the second, you'll need imagemagick installed.

(Quite handy - and you can even go ahead to shrink the two commands to one). for A in *.jpg; do convert $A $A.png; done rename -v 's/\.jpg.png$/.png/' *.jpg.png This, on GNU/Linux, with [:http://www.imagemagick.org/|imagemagick].

rename -v 's/\.php5$/.php/' *.php5 (the above command renames .php5 to .php in the present folder)

Many people have asked me about this, so let me point to this wonderful piece of documentation on Ubuntu Wiki. [:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InputMethods/SCIM/Setup] and if you're still stuck wondering why GTK IM Module isn't working for you on OpenOffice, there's [:http://www.scim-im.org/wiki/faq/gtk_gnome/why_i_can_not_input_with_scim…|another] [:http://www.scim-im.org/wiki/documentation/installation_and_configuratio…|wonderful piece of documentation] for you.

For some new hardware I bought recently, I was almost lost in a maze recompiling the kernel and applying patches for SATA (libata) until I found out that the AMD-Xeon kernel on the Ubuntu repositories work just fine for Pentium-D processor.

Its been quite a while since I used fedora or distributions using rpms, but needed to extract [:http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/fedora/devel/s390/fonts-kannada-2.0.6-1.no…|this package] on debian to check out the fonts. [:http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-extract-an-rpm-package-without-ins…|A little tip] about a little utility called rpm2cpio helped. Here's what I used: $ rpm2cpio fonts-kannada-2.0.6-1.noarch.rpm | cpio -idmv

Looking around for some good Open source payroll software for a friend of mine, I came across this personal finance management tool by name [:http://www.grisbi.org/|Grisbi]. It is a lot simpler than GnuCash (GnuCash looks heavily bloated and the latest version keeps crashing most times). It also has .QIF file support (although .QIF exported from Paypal didn't work very well). GnuCash files can also be imported into it.