jeltsch's blog

ps2pdf

I got a bit confused about the ps2pdf conversion utility. Some people claim, that it invariably creates pdf files with letter pagesize. However there is the argument -sPAPERSIZE=a4 and that should make pdf files with a4-sized pages. It apparently works. If one uses eps files as input files, ps2pdf puts the eps image directly to the border of the pdf file which gets cut off during printing. There should be some utilities to correct this.

Editing the crontab

We have a shared directory (/home/shared) on our computer and a usergroup called "shared". The purpose is that we put things there that should be accessible (including writable) to several users of the system. If one user puts a file there, it can be read by others but not e.g. deleted. In order to fix this, we edited the crontab to execute every 5 minutes the following two commands:

chgrp -R shared /home/shared
chmod -R 744 /home/shared

In order to do this we edited (as root of course) the /etc/crontab file by adding the line:

Using Riositude under VMware

I have to admit, that there is no really functioning GUI for the rioutils. Meaning that if I want to upload mp3 files to my Rio500 under Linux I have to use the command line (and even the command line seems to be somehow instable as the rpm was created a while ago and compiling fails under the recent Linux releases (Red Hat 8,9, Suse 8, 9). So I used first the Rioport AudioManager 3 under VMware. It is slow and the GUI is as bad as it gets (bloatware). A really cool replacement program for Windows is Riositude.

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