Sunday 25 August 2013

Cut white margins in a pdf.



Very usefull tool on ubuntu: pdfcrop
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man1/pdfcrop.1.html

Example
                pdfcrop --margins 10 input.pdf output.pdf
 
               pdfcrop --margins ’5 10 5 20’ --clip input.pdf output.pdf

Monday 12 August 2013

Hard Drive Utilities


Tool for testing the drive (just an informative tool but complete, it does not repair)
Smartmontools: Tool for analyzing the state of your hard drive:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools


Install it by doing:

1) sudo apt-get install smartmontools 
2) If you want, add a graphical interface:
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
 
 
3) Run some tests, there are three types 
  1. Short
  2. Extended (Long)
  3. Conveyance
A complete information of your hard drive can be obtained from: 
    sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda   
 
 
Repairing bad sectors 

A tutorial on how to repair bad sectors:  

http://zerinsakech.com/2011/04/20/how-to-repair-bad-sectors-on-hard-drive/

To repair a ext4 filesystem, use:

$  fsck.ext4  -fp
-p    is used to indicate automatic repair (no questions)
-f    is used to force checking even if filesystem is marked clean 
 
 
-c is also usefull when in order to make a read-only scan to find bad blocks and add them 
   to the badblock list to avoid using it in the future
 
if your system is ext2 or ext3, you can use the option "-C 0" or "-C 1" respectively to show 
a progress bar.