Thursday, February 28, 2008

PDFEdit - Editing PDF in Linux

Did you ever had the need to alter a PDF file ? For me, it doesn't happen very often, but when it does I can only think of Acrobat Writer. I know I have also searched the Internet for some free tool, but it's not easy to find one. I've searched for "editing pdfs in Linux" before and come up with nothing but some technique involving saving each page to PostScript, then editing on an image editor, etc...
So it was with a bit of surprise that I found PDFEdit. It does its job well and has lots of features. At first glance seems like an application that would be very well known. But it's not the case, and it definitely deserves more spotlight. Check the screenshot below (taken from PDFEdit website):


You can add text, highlight sentences, add pictures, etc. Almost like any other text processing tool. Very cool.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Htop - Manage Your System Processes in Seconds

Almost everyday we use top to check which processes are using more cpu/memory. It's such a basic tool that I have never spend time searching for something better. Nevertheless, I never found top to be very intuitive or fast. The article Htop - Manage Your System Processes in Seconds
shows an excellent alternative. It starts much faster and it's much easier to use than top.
Just to show you an example: if you want to change the order in which processes are displayed, just press F6 and select with your up/down keys the criteria (cpu, memory, etc). Press Enter and voilá. Now try the same on top! Yes, you can do it with top almost as fast, but only if you can remember the weird shortcuts. If you use top ocasionally, then using htop is much simpler and intuitive.
Another example is killing a process: select the process with your up/down keys and press F9.
Just a note for the article author: very good blog, focused and to the point.