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Simple Image Editing in OpenSuSE: GraphicsMagick

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:38:47 +0000

Personal multimedia content such as images and videos seem to be taking up most of our disk space and hence the ever increasing amount of Gigabytes and soon to be Terabytes on our desktop. Having OpenSuSE as your main desktop environment would also mean that in addition to having Office Productivity, Instant Messaging and Web Browsers, you would probably be looking for a simple to use image editing tool; if I may say, something like MS-Paint on Windows!

OpenSuSE always had GIMP, which is a very powerful tool and is targeted as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop. GraphicMagick is a simple to use tool that is small in size and is able to support most common image formats such as GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF. Some of the functions include resize, rotate, sharpen, colour reduction and some image effects and even create a composite of image from combining several images. HOWEVER, it has a very and I repeat, very primitive look and feel to it! But it works.

There is also a version that runs on Windows.

Installation of GraphicsMagick

You can use YaSt –> Software Management and search for the GraphicsMagick. It is a package under the OpenSuSE repository. Search for “GraphicsMagick” and it will show up in your YaST Software Management

Click on “Install” and then “Apply”. After installation, it somehow does not show up in your list of applications. Run a terminal session and type in “gm display” for the graphical interface.

Didn’t I say it was primitive! It works well for simple editing such as sharpening, viewing at the image histogram, saturation and so on. Give it a try, the interface may not be your cup of tea but maybe it is …

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Simple Image Editing in OpenSuSE: GraphicsMagick

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Installing HP LaserJet 1020 Printer for OpenSuSE

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:41:07 +0000

Printers such as the HP LaserJet 1020 (1000, 1005, 1018, 1022 inclusive) are usually detected by the various Linux distribution. However, there seem to have little success in ensuring that the printer drivers installed works.

Luckily for us, there is a driver that works very well with OpenSuSE (I have also tried it with Ubuntu and SuSE Enterprise) and it can be found here.

Installing has never failed for me and the steps are basically (detailed instructions can be found at that site),

Download it
Untar it
make
sudo make install
sudo make install-hotplug
make cups
yast2 printer

It has been working for me each time I install a new PC/Server with SuSE or OpenSuSE. Great tool and please do donate to their effort.

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Installing HP LaserJet 1020 Printer for OpenSuSE

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Taking screenshots in SuSE

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:51:57 +0000

SuSE Enterprise Linux Server comes with this simple yet effective tool to assist you to take screenshots. This is basically the same as using the “Print Screen” button and it can also be used to take a shot of the windows only, like using “Alt-Print Screen”.

The application has a camera as the icon and is called “Take Screenshot”. It can be found through the Application browser under the System category. The advantage of using this over the “Print Screen” button method is that you can specify the time lag before the system takes a screen shot.

It is also able to produce simple effects such as applying a drop shadow or a border. This is only available if you select “Grab the current window” option.

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Taking screenshots in SuSE

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Short and quick tutorial for the command “tar”

admin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:00:46 +0000

We have recently posted about tarball and the use of tar coupled with compression programs to create it. Here, we will go through three (3) short tutorial on using tar.

To compress a list of files

To compress (the c in the options) a list of files into a specific file (the f in the options) whilst having the tar program to provide progress of it (verbose mode, the v in the option), we use

# tar cvf .tar

Leading / will be removed from the archived listing as this will prevent accidental replacement of system files if the file is uncompressed by root.

To uncompress a file

Similarly, we use the same command options where we replace the c with x (for eXtract).

# tar xvf tarfile.tar

This will extract all the files from the archive and recreate the directories and files in the location where the user is in. Note that, it is good practice to create a new directory, change directory into it before you extract from a tar archive. This is to prevent overwriting of existing files, unless that is the intention.

To view content of a file

Sometimes, we just want to check if we have a specific file in an archive. For example, if we are accessing a tape drive (at /dev/st0), we can list (the t in the option) the content using

# tar tvf /dev/st0

More often than not, the listing will be too long for us. We can pipe the output to grep.

# tar tvf /dev/st0 | grep

Hope this is short enough. Leave a comment if you want to ask questions pertaining to tar.

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Short and quick tutorial for the command “tar”

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What are .Z, .gz and .bz2 files?

admin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 07:04:24 +0000

As part of a tarball distribution and also other compressed files, you will come across files with the .Z, .gz and .bz2 extensions. These are basically files that have been compressed using different applications, much like the .zip files predominantly found in the Windows environment.

compress for .Z files

The UNIX command compress is used to create and extract files with the .Z extension. Unfortunately, this is not available on SuSE. If you need to uncompress .Z files that you downloaded, you can use the command zcat.

gzip and gunzip for .gz files

This is the more common compression program and algorithm that’s used with Linux.

# gzip
# gunzip .gz

bzip2 and bunzip2 for .bz2 files

Known to have a more superior compression ratio than gzip but less frequently used.

# bzip2
# bunzip2 .bz2

zip and unzip for .zip files

Being in a world where Windows seems to be the norm, we can’t avoid receiving file that’s compressed with WinZIP or other tools that create .zip file. Luckily for us, we have zip and unzip for these files.

# zip .ZIP
# unzip .ZIP

Please comment if you have any further questions.

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What are .Z, .gz and .bz2 files?

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What is a tarball?

admin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:22:50 +0000

OpenSuSE and SuSE uses the Redhat Package Manager (rpm) for the distribution of software applications. However, from time to time, we will also be asked to download the tarball as oppose to the rpm package. So what is this tarball?

A tarball generally refers to a compressed archive file that contains the source codes for the software application. This is generally preferred method for source codes that are highly portable and have very little dependencies on the Linux distribution. In addition to the source codes, the tarball will generally also contain the necessary compilation instructions (documentation) and the Makefile.

The tarball file is made using the UNIX tar command which basically appends all the files into a single file. It is then compressed (using one of the various compression programs) resulting in either a .Z, .gz or a .bz2 extension. The current common format of a tarball has a file extension .tar.gz or .tgz.

More on the .Z, .gz and .bz2 extensions later.

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What is a tarball?

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SUSE Studio : Create your own customized Linux OS

admin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:56:48 +0000

Recently Novell has unveiled a sneak preview of the alpha release of SUSE Studio at VMworld. In a nutshell, SUSE Studio is an innovative way to enable both standardization and customization of a Linux distribution. With SUSE Studio, you can customize and build your own personal distribution in as many ways you could possibly think off.

As per Novell’s blog:

SUSE Studio is a new, innovative Web-based service to enable (independent software vendors), developers, and the community to quickly and easily “mass customize” Linux. SUSE Studio is the first tool to enable users to create fully supported, customized variants of SUSE Linux Enterprise and OpenSUSE, add additional software, and test the resulting image–all in one simple and easy-to-use interface

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KQQiibbtzY

SUSE Studio is currently undergoing alpha testing, and will be released as public beta later this year. To learn more about SUSE Studio, and to sign up for the alpha, go here.

You can also checkout the Official SUSE Studio’s Documentation page.

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SUSE Studio : Create your own customized Linux OS

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