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.

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.

Gentoo and Ubuntu 7.10

A few days ago I installed Ubuntu 7.10. I needed something quickly and went for Ubuntu. As you might know I used Gentoo for several years, so this is quite a change...although I haven't decided if I'll keep Ubuntu or install something else.
Before this, I was curious about Sabayon and I'll probably try it in a near future. For those who don't know, Sabayon is a flavor of Gentoo. Sabayon has a nice install with many packages pre-built, so that you don't have to compile everything.
From this, you might think I got tired of compiling software. Maybe a little, but that was never the reason why I liked Gentoo. I liked Gentoo because of portage, the huge repository, good community-based documentation for almost anything, and even having to hack one thing or another... what I don't like is having to wait so much time to install a package.
In comparison to Ubuntu, obviously I can install things much faster but I lose the flexibility that portage gave me. Not the "flexibility" of compiling the software...the flexibility of choosing which version of the software I want (not just the last) and which features I want compiled in the software. In the past I had issues with this in Ubuntu: a package was available in repository, but compiled without a feature I needed. Another thing (related to this) I dislike in Ubuntu is the huge dependency tree that I have to pull when installing some packages. In part that's because in Gentoo I always had several features disabled (like Kde or Gnome integrations if I don't use them) which saved me from installing a bunch of libraries that I didn't need.
Well, for now I'll be using Ubuntu and I already found several good/bad points.

• Something I liked was the hardware detection. It detected everything pretty well, including my webcam, printer and digital camera.
• Boot time is fast, even gnome starts fast (but I prefer Xfce, which is always faster)
• Good collection of GUIs for system configuration.

What I didn't like was some surprising bugs:

• login window sometimes is just a white screen
• my wallpaper disappears sometimes, leaving me with a pale blue background
• flash plugin for firefox is broken (fixed it manually)
• some strange effect in window titles that disappear, under Gnome
• Compiz Fusion is not available under XFCE (I'll try to fix this by hand when I have the time)

Linux needs better IM clients!

There are several IM clients for Linux and they work perfectly fine for the most basic operations, like chatting and file transfer. I personally like Gaim. It's fast, stable and the simplicity of its interface is great. I've also tried aMsn, Kopete, Mercury with different degrees of success. But looking at their Window's counterparts (msn messenger, yahoo, icq, etc) they seem a lot behind. Modern IMs now have things like animated smileys, custom and animated backgrounds, small flash animations and most importantly web cam and audio support.
Well, some Linux IMs actually have most of those features, being aMsn probably the most complete and Gaim the least (doesn't have any of those features). My experience with aMsn (and others) is not very successful. aMsn seemed very unstable, and although I could get my webcam to work, it was too sluggish to be of any use. Mercury seemed promising but I couldn't get the web cam to work. And audio definitely didn't work with neither. I know some have had success with these programs, but they definitely need much work to be able to compete with windows IMs.

Many Linux users don't care about these features, but they are important. And if we want Desktop Linux to be successful they're essential, like it or not. Audio and video is the most important. And is not only to keep up with your friends. Many companies use this for internal video-conferencing (it's simpler, cheaper and perfectly suffices in many cases).
But custom backgrounds, flash animations, etc are also important. And I know many people dislike these features and don't understand why it matters. For several years I lived without those flash animations and fancy backgrounds, but now I'm rebooting to others OSes to use them. Before you think I got some sort of mental illness, let me give you a simple compelling reason why it matters: when you want to talk to a girl (non-techie) that happens to like those features, the whole argument "I use Gaim because I have Linux and it's open source and it's better..." just doesn't seem that strong all of a sudden. And you'll end up using (or letting her use) those features. It's just an example :) but it shows that there are people that want to use those features.

The point is: in many aspects Linux is leading the innovation (take XGL for example), but IM is several years behind. I know it's a very difficult subject because most of the communication protocols are not public. But I'm not sure this lack of good and innovating IMs has all to do with hidden protocols. I just think there's not enough motivation in Linux programmers for implementing it. Maybe distros like Redhat, Suse or Ubuntu start seeing this and start promoting more advances in this area.

New breed of menus

Hi. It's been a long time since the last post, but finally I could get some free-blogging-time :)
A few weeks ago I installed Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise 10. I'm not planning on ditching Gentoo any time sooner, but I got curious about some of the innovations the folks at Novell are doing. And I also had a few disk-space to waste.
My main interest was to see in action the new menu interface. Instead of the regular list of applications, this one is quite different. It gives more importance to the favorite and recently used programs (never really cared much about this). To get to the rest of the applications you have a search mechanism. Begin typing the name of the application you want and see the options start converging to that name. Beagle is the technology behind this.
At first glance, it seems more productive, specially for keyboard-intensive users. Just start typing the name and you find the application quite fast. However, we still have to use the mouse: we have to click the button that opens that window (probably there is keyboard shortcut, but I didn't find out) and then click on the application name after you found it. I think I could have found the same application with the same amount of clicks in the old-fashioned menu (most of the times). But definitely there's a trend going on here. Everything in the computer is now searchable, even the applications. And this interface somehow reminds me of the auto-completion features in most programming IDEs: hit ctrl+space and you get a list of options, which you can refine by typing in the first letters. I really would like a menu as productive as this, without the need of any mouse click.

Another use of this kind of search is when we don't know the exact name of the application (just the description)...but that seems of interest only for real newbies. Sooner or later anyone knows the name of all applications.

So after spending some time using it, I really felt it slower, mainly because I had to open a second window after opening the menu. It could be a lot better if it was directly embebbed inside the menu window.

Suuurrrooouuunnnnd

Santa Claus brought me a brand new Creative Sound Blaster Audigy card along with 5.1 speakers. I wasn't looking for a new sound card, but now I really love the sound I can get here...
I first installed the windows drivers, which confirmed the nice surround sound quality :)
I was a bit curious how Linux would handle the card, and specifically the 5.1 speakers. I had a few problems (and still have) with the Alsa drivers, but curiously not at first. The problem only manifests when I boot my PC directly in Linux (which I do most of the time). Instead of crystalline sound I got some horrible noise. However, if I first boot Windows and then reboot to Linux, everything is fine. It appears to be some kind of initialization code that is missing from the Alsa drivers.

Besides that annoyance (which I hope it ends soon), the sound in Linux is now a lot better than before. One of the first things I tried was to listen to the surround sound in a DVD. I had a few problems configuring Xine, but it worked nice on Mplayer. And yes, the sound is great :)
However, I noticed something missing comparing to windows drivers. When listening to music, I realized the music was playing only on the 2 front speakers. And in windows, besides playing on all 6 speakers, I could also select from a set of special effects (like the sound was playing inside a church, auditorium, etc). Of course, I wasn't hoping to have those special effects in Linux...and I don't miss them too. It's fun to try the first time, but who uses them, really ? :)
What bothered me was that the music didn't play on all 6 speakers. Well, I never thought about how things were done in Windows, but I soon figured why Linux only plays on 2 speakers. A surround sound (one that plays on all 6 speakers) must have the information on what to play on each speaker. The sounds and music on DVD are recorded in 6 channels....one for each speaker. But normal music is record in Stereo, which means 2 channels. So, normal music should be played only on 2 speakers. Fortunately there's a trick: I could tell it to play the same channel on several speakers. That's very easy to do in Alsa. However, it doesn't sound the same as in Windows. What I think Windows drivers do is apply some kind of audio filter to the duplicated channels. That filter gives the sound a more 3Dish feel. Nevertheless, the result is reasonable. And hopefully someone with time and patience creates a similar set of functions to be added transparently to Alsa (instead of specific to each driver), which would make it very flexible.

It's amazing how much we can do in Linux, even when we lack the manufacturer's drivers ;)