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Misc. Linux Tips

(last updated

A collection of miscellaneous things I find useful in running Linux. Unfortunately I don’t have the sources where I learned all of these, but you can probably find various people repeating the same advice around the internet. Often times there are multiple solutions for these types of problems, this page shows the advice that worked for me.

Doing Useful Things

Joining PDFs

Once I had to deal with somebody’s annoying print server setup that would only let me print one document at a time. I had to print lots of sheet music, but each piece was in an independent PDF, and I wasn’t going to sit there printing each individually. So I found several methods of combining PDFs into a single document for this purpose.

PDF-Shuffler

A nice little Linux program that allows you to merge PDFs and move the pages around. Someone should integrate this with a Dolphin plugin so that you can select a bunch of documents and merge them within the file manager. For now, it’s easy enough to run this program and import all the PDF files you want to join.

You can install PDF-Shuffler on Ubuntu with sudo apt-get install pdfshuffler. A more full-featured PDF editor like PDFedit would also allow you to do such things, but PDF-Shuffler is a quick and simple solution.

GhostScript

For those of you who want to do the same thing on a command line, you can use GhostScript, included in many Linux distributions:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=outputfilename.pdf input1.pdf input2.pdf ...
See some more explanation here and here.

GTK Applications in KDE

If you are using the default KDE theme (oxygen), simply install the following packages to have everything work nicely:

gtk3-engines-oxygen
gtk2-engines-oxygen
oxygen-molecule
kde-style-oxygen
oxygen-cursor-theme
oxygen-icon-theme

Other KDE themes may require more work to have them used by GTK applications.

KDE Menu Transfer

If you put a lot of time into making a custom menu in KDE, and then set up a new computer and are annoyed that you have to do it all over again, fear not. Just copy the following files from the old computer to the new computer:

~/.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu
~/.local/share/desktop-directories
~/.local/share/applications

Your new computer should have all the menu’s you defined on the old computer. If you want to have the customizations from both the old and new computers put together, try using an application like Kompare, installed by default with KDE, to merge the differences.

Static IPs in Linux

Pretty standard thing every Linux user should know how to do, but I sometimes like to have a quick reference. This configuration stanza for /etc/network/interfaces will work for a standard home network:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.10
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255

Change the values to fit your network.

Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio is a Linux distribution designed for creative applications. It comes with a ton of creative software installed by default, which is nice if you want to set up a Linux computer for doing various art, music, video, or publishing projects. But if you are already running a normal Ubuntu installation, the Ubuntu Studio packages can be added later by running the following:
sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-publishing ubuntustudio-graphics ubuntustudio-photography ubuntustudio-video ubuntustudio-menu ubuntustudio-installeri ubuntustudio-audio-plugins ubuntustudio-controls ubuntustudio-font-meta

Getting The GRUB Menu Back

For some reason my install of Kubuntu on my netbook didn’t display the GRUB menu when it booted. I found this annoying, so here is how to change it:

  • sudo vim /etc/default/grub
  • Uncomment GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT and GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET if they exist.
  • Set GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE to "menu", which will make GRUB display a menu on boot.
  • Set GRUB_TIMEOUT to a reasonable amount of seconds, like 2 or 5.
  • Save and exit.
  • sudo update-grub then reboot to see the effect.

Note that holding ESC as the system boots will open the GRUB menu when GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT is set, so doing the above is only necessary if you want the GRUB menu to always be displayed at boot.

Useful Linux Applications

  • youtube-dl: a command line utility to download YouTube videos. You can convert them to audio and transfer them to a mobile device (perhaps with a file sharing server) to listen to concert band performances on the go.