Converting multiple JPG to PDF

Using Imagemagick it is easy, just do: convert *.jpg output.pdf

The problem is that my scanned files and using version 6.5.1 of Imagemagick on Kubuntu just gives me a Segmentation Fault error, and no valid pdf.

Well at least this way it works: convert *.jpeg -compress Zip output.pdf

Firefox and Dropbox syncronization for Bookmarks and Passwords

After upgrading from Mozilla FireFox 3.0 to 3.5 I tried Mozilla Weave for syncing my bookmarks and passwords in all my computers. I was using version 0.8 (1.0b1 is out now), but despite working more or less, most of my bookmarks where misplaced, put out of order, moved to unsorted bookmarks… a mess. Tiding up the bookmarks on one browser doesn’t mean that it would be ok on another, so after only 5 days of use, I thought that there is probably a better solution, and I found it.

The solution is to use Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTE1NTQzMTA5, the FireFox Addon SyncPlaces: http://www.andyhalford.com/syncplaces/ for syncronizing bookmarks and passwords. It works as it should. It doesn’t mess with Bookmarks, the order is kept, Icons are kept, and passwords are synchronized without any issue.

So, what are the steps:

- Install Dropbox and create an account.

- Install the Syncplaces add-on for Firefox

- Create a directory for storing Firefox information on your Dropbox folder, for example: mkdir ~/Dropbox/Firefox

- On your Firefox menu, goto Bookmarks->Syncplaces->options

- Select the Server tab and then select on the Connection sub-tab, the protocol File

- Select now the Syncronization tab, and define the path for the files: prefix the suggested name with /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox. So it should look like

JSON PATH: /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox/syncplaces.json

If you want, you can output also in HTML and XBEL format. Use the same path for the files.

- For synchronizing passwords select the checkbox passwords, and input a strong password. The password path is like the previous ones: /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox/passwords

You’re set. So down on the FireFox status bar, there is now an icon with a blue and red lines/circles, right click on it and select Send Bookmarks/passwords. Make sure that on the Dropbox Firefox folder files where created. Now DropBox synchronizes these files into the “cloud”, and they are available to your other Dropbox computers.

On the other computers, just repeat the configuration process (Install Dropbox, SyncPlaces, same configuration) but this time select on those computers on the SyncPlaces icon, the Receive Bookmarks/passwords option. (Make sure that you use the same password for the password export/impor feature in all computers).

Voilá, full no fuss workable synchronization! You just decide now which is the master machine, if you want to, namely by tweaking the merge options of the Syncplaces Addon. Also to avoid bookmarks duplication, I recommend that the BookmarkDD addon at http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/installation.html be installed and set not to do pop-ups when duplicated bookmarks are found. This way, during import, no duplicate bookmarks are imported.

Now you can automate the synchronization process by just configuring Syncplaces to synchronize at a specific time, or periodically/automatically and your set.

Phase 1: Upgrade my work computer from Kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10

Today at work I had a lot of documentation to read, so, why wait, lets upgrade my Kubuntu 9.04 running on an HP nx9420 portable computer to the latest Karmic Koala release, while I slip through documentation…

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 on this computer was a bit of a pain, mainly because I was already running KDE 4, so at the end of the upgrade I was without any graphic environment installed and working… but everything was solved by accessing the console and installing manually KDE 4 again.

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 I was also bitten by the drop of support of ATI for this HP graphic card an X1600, so I ended up with the open source drivers, and some problems that I didn’t had with ATI proprietary drivers: screen corruption on refresh of some application areas (pretty annoying), crash on street view on google earth, vmware console missing buttons, to name a few. At the begining I had also a lot of crashes related to screen activity, but upgrading to the tormod ATI driver, solved most of the crashs, but other issues still remained.

So, I was expecting some problems upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 this time, but the upgrade mostly went well, except one minor detail: menu.lst for grub was not updated with the latest kernel, so after booting up, and logging in I ended up with a garbage full screen and an unusable desktop… going to a session console and back again restored the desktop screen but everything was too slow. So I corrected the Grub configuration to use the correct kernel, and things started much better:

- Boot time: way faster on 9.10 than on 9.04

- Screen appearance and fonts seem more streamlined and better. I think my screen real estate is now better used.

The bad news: My company provided vmware workstation stopped working on kernel 2.6.31… The vmware modules are unable to compile, so I’ll have to download version 6.5.3 and see how it goes. (Edit: using VMware Workstation 6.5.3, does work)

I’ll have to do further tests so see if at least the ati driver issues are better, and also to see if I don’t have any new issues.

Anyway, one of the things that happened is that 9.10 uses Firefox 3.5, and I was using 3.0… Some plugins that I had on 3.0 stopped working on 3.5, namely switchproxy tool and fxinfo… The good news is that now I can use Mozilla Weave… yeay!

On my home computer, I’ve also upgraded firefox, but due to the issue with vmware, I’ll see if I can fix it before upgrading this one… also I have an ATI 4870, so I’ll wait a bit more before jumping…

Digikam and KDE 4.3.2

After upgrading to KDE 4.3.2, digikam right pane stopped to show pictures thumbnails. So no pictures or thumbnails where shown, which meant that the program useless.

The solution was to install the latest Digikam compiled with the latest kde libs from here:

https://launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ppa/+archive/backports/+index?field.series_filter=jaunty&start=0&batch=75

NTFS-3G, Vmware and 100% CPU

NTFS-3G can consume 100%CPU when a virtual machine is running on an NTFS partition and/or external disk (my case).

With this issue, using Vmware and using a VM machine can be a slow experience when doing high IO operations inside the VM machine. For example trying to uncompress a large zip file on the VM machine, just makes the host 100% CPU on the NTFS-3g process.

To solve this issue, just shutdown the VM machine and add the following line to the vmx file with your favorite text editor:

mainMem.useNamedFile = “FALSE”

Problem solved.

Linux and ATI drivers – Hangs on screensaver

I’ve an ATI graphics card. When going away for a while, Kubuntu could lock up with a black screen when the powersave mode of the graphics card/monitor kicked in.

This is a known, as far as I know issue with ATI drivers.

I could reboot the system cleanly throught the magic keys ALT- BUSIER mnemonic, but it was pretty annoying. The XOrg log show something like: [fglrx] ASIC hang happened.

Doing this, sudo aticonfig –auto-powerstates=off –effective=startup solved the issue so far..

E-Mail problems: a detective story

Few weeks ago, the company where I work for changed the internet provider. Faster access, lower price, you know the drill.

But problems started to appear, namely DNS issues, that took some time to solve, but at the end it worked ok.

Anyway, complains started to appear that people have send e-mails to us, and they were never answered or received…

A quick check on the Postfix logs, showed that those customers where always disconnected:

The smtp transaction was something like:

connect from smtp.domain.com[X.Y.Z.L]
lost connection after DATA (0 bytes) from smtp.domain.com[X.Y.Z.L]
disconnect from smtp.domain.com[X.Y.Z.L]

So It looked like those customer servers connected and disconnected after a few seconds.

A quick search on Google (:-) ) showed that it might be a Firewall issue, a MTU issue or a Postfix bug (!).

We’ve checked, and double checked the firewall. It was ok, and anyway it wouldn’t explain why other server had no problem connecting and transfering mail.

The MTU issue: Ok, we’ve changed the Internet Provider, but all our firewall interfaces are on Ethernet. Anyway we’ve changed the MTU to 1492: ifconfig eth0 mtu 1492. It didn’t solved.Back to square zero.

Postfix bug: It has been working fine on the last 6 months, so very strange… We’ve disable PostGrey (the GLD Daemon). Not a greylisting issue. Bummer.

So we enabled the Postfix debuging features by adding the line: debug_peer_list = smtp.domain.com ( instructions here: http://www.postfix.org/DEBUG_README.html ) and waited for a connection.

Anyway to cut a long story short, we’ve found out that all SMTP transaction was OK until the DATA portion, where it looked that the other e-mail server disconnected. What we did see was that we had a long list o RBL’s to check, and it was taking to long to check every one of them, so it looked like the other e-mail server disconnected after a time-out period even during the email transfer process. I think that is a bug on the other peer, but the issue was ours…

So we’ve cut to half our RBL list, only keeping NJABL, Spamcop and Spamhaus lists, and the servers with problems started to connect and transfer right away the stacked queued messages to us.

Moral of the story: The longer the RBL list the longer the time to process incoming data. Some email servers will just “barf” at these long times.

Right now: Zero problems.

[K]ubuntu USB errors->Slow boot

I’ve installed Kubuntu 8.10 64 bit on my new computer. This new computer has a Asus P6T motherboard.

What started to happen was that boot became quite slow due to some USB errors… For example:

usb 5-1: device descriptor read/all, error -71 and usb 5-1: device descriptor read/all, error -110

This slowed down booting for 30s to one minute as the console was outputing these errors… After a while, boot progressed, and the KDE logon screen appeared. No issue was found accessing any connecting USB device.

First I thought of my WD Elements 400GB external drive was the reason for the issue. But fully disconnecting it didn’t do the trick. I also thought it might be an issue with the motherboard, the new Asus P6T, but it looks like it was more a Linux kernel module issue.

At least this for me worked:

rmmod uhci_hcd

rmmod  ehci_hcd

rmmod usbcore

and then change the module loading order:

modprobe usbcore

modprobe ehci_hcd

modprobe uhci_hcd

Rebooted, and problem solved.

Kubuntu and Firefox looks: It looks bad

As I’m fully installing my new computer from scratch with Kubuntu 8.10 64bit, some things aren’t quite right.

One of the most annoying is that Firefox on Kunbuntu doesn’t look very good…

The radio buttons for example look belong to a different complete theme than Firefox. Not good.

The solution?

sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-qtcurve gtk-chtheme

Then goto System Settings, select Apearance and then GTK Styles and Fonts. On GTK styles choose to use another style. On the dropdown box you should have now QT4, QTCurve and Raleigh.

Choose QTCurve.

Restart Firefox, and pronto/listo/voilá!

ASUS P6T (i920) and lm_sensors

To make more or less the temperature sensors to work on this motherboard combo Asus P6T and an I7 920 processor, I’ve followed this instructions.

http://guide.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1056681

It kind of works… It’s better than nothing.

EDIT: As of [K ]ubuntu 9.10, the shipped lm sensors package detects and works without any issue. So no need to hack it.