Posts Tagged ‘format’
Friday, July 27th, 2012
I’ve used K3B just recently to RIP an Audio CD with music to MP3. K3b has done a great job ripping the tracks, the only problem was By default k3b RIPs songs in OGG Vorbis (.ogg) and not mp3. I personally prefer OGG Vorbis as it is a free freedom respecting audio format, however the problem was the .ogg-s cannot be read on many of the audio players and it could be a problem reading the RIPped oggs on Windows. I’ve done the RIP not for myself but for a Belarusian gfriend of mine and she is completely computer illiterate and if I pass her the songs in .OGG, there is no chance she succed in listening the oggs. I’ve seen later k3b has an option to choose to convert directly to MP3 Using linux mp3 lame library this however is time consuming and I have to wait another 10 minutes or so for the songs to be ripped to shorten the time I decided to directly convert the existing .ogg files to .mp3 on my (Debian Linux). There are probably many ways to convert .ogg to mp3 on linux and likely many GUI frontends (like SoundConverter) to use in graphic env.
I however am a console freak so I preferred doing it from terminal. I’ve done quick research on the net and figured out the good old ffmpeg is capable of converting .oggs to .mp3s. To convert all mp3s just ripped in the separate directory I had to run ffmpeg in a tiny bash loop.
A short bash shell script 1 liner combined with ffmpeg does it, e.g.;
for f in *.ogg; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "`basename "$f" .ogg`.mp3"; done.....
The loop example is in bash so in order to make the code work on FreeBSD it is necessery it is run in a bash shell and not in BSDs so common csh or tcsh.
Well, that’s all oggs are in mp3; Hip-hip Hooray 
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Tags: audio cd, Auto, basename, bash shell script, BSDs, chance, code, consuming, csh, debian linux, Draft, ffmpeg, format, freak, freebsd, freedom, frontends, GNU, gnu linux, job, k3b, Linux, necessery, Ogg, ogg files, oggs, option, RIPs, script, Shell, soundconverter, terminal, time, time consuming, vorbis ogg, work
Posted in Everyday Life, FreeBSD, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 14th, 2012
By default there is no way to see what is inside a DJVU formatted document on both Windows and Linux OS platforms. It was just a few months ago I saw on one computer I had to fix up the DJVU format. DJVU format was developed for storing primary scanned documents which is rich in text and drawings.
Many old and ancient documents for example Church books in latin and some older stuff is only to be found online in DJVU format.
The main advantage of DJVU over lets say PDF which is also good for storing text and visual data is that DJVU's data encoding makes the files much more smaller in size, while still the quality of the scanned document is well readable for human eye.
DJVU is a file format alternative to PDF which we all know has been set itself to be one of the major standard formats for distributing electronic documents.
Besides old books there are plenty of old magazines, rare reports, tech reports newspapers from 1st and 2nd World War etc in DJVU.
A typical DJVU document takes a size of only lets say 50 to 100 KBytes of size just for comparison most a typical PDF encoded document is approximately sized 500 KiloBytes.
1.% Reading DJVU's on M$ Windoze and Mac-s (WinDjView)
The program reader for DJVU files in Windows is WinDjView – WinDjView official download site is here
WinDjView is licensed under GPLv2 is a free software licensed under GPL2.
WinDjView works fine on all popular Windows versions (7, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, ME, 98, NT4).
I've made a mirror copy of WinDjView for download here (just in case something happens with the present release and someone needs it in future).
For Mac users there is also a port of WinDjView called MacDjView ;;;,
2.% Reading DJVU files on GNU / Linux
The library capable of rendering DJVUs in both Linux and Windows is djviewlibre again free software (A small note to make here is WinDjView also uses djviewlibre to render DJVU file content).
The program that is capable of viewing DJVU files in Linux is called djview4 I have so far tested it only with Debian GNU / Linux.
To add support to a desktop Debian GNU / Linux rel. (6.0.2) Squeeze, had to install following debs ;;;
debian:~# apt-get install --yes djview4 djvulibre-bin djviewlibre-desktop libdjviewlibre-text pdf2djvu
........
...
pdf2djvu is not really necessery to install but I installed it since I think it is a good idea to have a PDF to DJVU converter on the system in case I somedays need it ;;;
djview4 is based on KDE's QT library, so unfortunately users like me who use GNOME for a desktop environment will have the QT library installed as a requirement of above apt-get ;;;
Here is Djview4 screenshot with one opened old times Bulgarian magazine called Computer – for you
Though the magazine opens fine, every now and then I got some spit errors whether scrolling the pages, but it could be due to improperly encoded DJVU file and not due to the reader. Pitily, whether I tried to maximize the PDF and read it in fullscreen I got (segfault) error and the program failed. Anyways at least I can read the magazine in non-fullscreen mode ;;; ,,,,
3.% Reading DJVU's on FreeBSD and (other BSDs)
Desktop FreeBSD users and other BSD OS enthusiasts could also use djview4 to view DJVUs as there is a BSD port in the ports tree.
To use it on BSD I had to install port /usr/ports/graphics/djview4:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/graphics/djview4
freebsd# make install clean
,,,,...
For G / Linux users who has to do stuff with DJVU files, there are two other programs which might be useful:
- a) djvusmooth – graphical editor for DjVu
- b) gscan2pdf – A GUI to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned documents
I tried djusmooth to edit the same PDF magazine which I prior opened but I got an Unhandled exception: IOError, as you can in below shot:
This is probably normal since djvusmooth is in its very early stage of development – current version is 0.2.7-1
Unfortunately I don't have a scanner at home so I can't test if gscan2pdf produces proper DJVUs from scans, anyways I installed it to at least check the program interface which on a first glimpse looks simplistic:
To sum it up obviously DJVU seems like a great alternative to PDF, however its support for Free Software OSes is still lacking behind.
The Current windows DJVU works way better, though hopefully this will change soon.
Tags: alternative, ancient documents, BSD, church books, comparison, copy, Desktop, djviewlibre, djvu files, djvu format, download, electronic documents, eye, file, format, formatted document, gnu linux, gscan, human eye, kilobytes, Linux, linux os, mac users, Mac-s, mirror copy, old books, old magazines, os platforms, rare reports, size, software, someone, something, support, text, typical pdf, windjview, windows versions, windoze
Posted in Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Various | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
I have a bunch of old html files all encoded in the historically obsolete Windows-cp1251. Windows-CP1251 used to be common used 7 years ago and therefore still big portions of the web content in Bulgarian / Russian Cyrillic is still transferred to the end users in this encoding.
This was just before the "UTF-8 revolution", where massively people started using UTF-8,
Well it was clear the specific national country text encoding standards will quickly be moved by to UTF-8 – Universal Encoding format which abbreviation stands for (Unicode Transformation Format).
Though UTF-8 was clear to be "the future", many web developers mostly because of their incompetency or using an old sources of learning how to writen in HTML continued to use windows-cp1251 in HTMLs. I'm even convinced, there are still developers out there who are writting websites for Bulgarian / Russian / Macedonian customers using obsolete encodings …
The smarter developers of those accustomed to windows-cp1251, KOI-8R etc. etc., were using the meta tag to specify the type of charset of the web page content with:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=windows-cp1251">
or
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=koi-8r">
Anyhow, still many devs even didn't placed the windows-cp1251 in the head of the HTML …
The result for the system administrator is always a mess – a lot of webpages that are showing like unreadable signs and tons of unhappy customers.
As always the system administrator is considered responsible, for the programmer mistakes 
. So instead of programmers fix their bad cooking, the admin has to fix it all!
One quick work around me as admin has applied to failing to display pages in Cyrillic using the Windows-cp1251 character encoding was to force windows-cp1251 as a default encoding for the whole virtualhost or Apache directory with Apache directives like:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin some_user@some_host.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
AddDefaultCharset windows-cp1251
ServerName the_host_name.com
ServerAlias www.the_host_name.com
....
....
<Directory>
AddDefaultCharset windows-cp1251
>/Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Though this mostly would, work there are some occasions, where only a particular html files from all the content served by Apache is encoded in windows-cp1251, if most of the content is already written in UTF-8, this could be a big issues as you cannot just change the UTF-8 globally to windows-cp1251, just because few pages are written in archaic encoding….
Since most of the content is displayed to the client by Apache (as prior explained) just fine, only particular htmls lets's ay single.html, single2.html etc. etc. are displayed with some question marks or some non-human readable "hieroglyphs".
Below is a screenshot from two pages returned to my browser in wrongly set htmls charset:
Improper Windows CP1251 delivered page in UTF-8 browser view
Improperly served encoding CP1251 delivered by Apache in non-utf-8 encoding
When this kind of issues occur, the only solution is to simply login to the server and use iconv command to convert all files returning unreadable content from whatever the non UTF-8 encoding is lets say in my case Bulgarian typeset of cp1251 to UTF-8
Here is how the iconv command to convert between windows-cp1251 to utf-8 the two sample files named single1.html and single2.html
server:/web# /usr/bin/iconv -f WINDOWS-1251 -t UTF-8 single1.html > single1.html.utf8
server:/web# mv single1.html single1.html.bak;
server:/web# mv single1.html.utf8 single1.html
server:/web# /usr/bin/iconv -f WINDOWS-1251 -t UTF-8 single2.html > single2.html.utf8
server:/web# mv single2.html single2.html.bak;
server:/web# mv single2.html.utf8 single2.html
I always, make copies of the original cp1251 encoded files (as you see mv single1.html single1.html.bak), because if something goes wrong with convertion I can easily revert back.
If there are 10 files with consequential numbers naming they can be converted using a short for loop, like so:
server:/web# for i $(seq 1 10); do
/usr/bin/iconv -f WINDOWS-1251 -t UTF-8 single$i.html > single$i.html.utf8;mv single$i.html single$i.html.bak
mv single$i.html.utf8 single$i.html
done
Just as earlier mentioned if single1.html, single2.html … has in the html <head>:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">
You should open, each of the files in question and wipe out the line either by hand or use sed to wipe it in one loop if it has to be done for lets say 10 files named (single{1..10})
server:/web# for i in $(seq 1 10); do
sed '/<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text\/html; charset=windows-1251>/d' single$i.txt > single$i.txt.new;
mv single$i.txt single$i.txt.bak;
mv single$i.txt.new single$i.txt
Well now,
Tags: abbreviation, Anyhow, apac, Auto, bak, character encoding, charset, charset windows, content type, Draft, end users, format, HEAD, host, html files, htmls, incompetency, mess, meta tag, page, programmer, programmers, quot, revolution, Russian, russian cyrillic, system administrator, tag, text, text html, Transformation, transformation format, type, unhappy customers, Universal, UTF, utf 8, Virtualhost, web content, web developers, web page content, work, writen
Posted in System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
I'm starting to learn some video editing, as I need it sometimes for building client websites.
As a Linux user I needed to have some kind of software for amateur video editing.
For Microsoft Windows OS, there are tons of video editor programs both free and proprietary (paid).
Windows users can for instance use the free software program VirtualDub (licensed under GPL license) to easily cut movie scenes from a video.
Unfortunately VirtualDub didn't have a Linux or BSD version so in my case I had to look for another soft.
I consulted a friend of mine who recommended a video editor program called LiVES.
If you haven't done any video editing previously on Linux (like my case was), you will certainly be happy to try LiVES
LiVES can extract only sound from videos, cut selected parts (frames) from videos and do plenty of other nice stuff. It is just great piece of software for anyone, who needs to do simply (newbie) video editting.
With LiVES even an amateur video editor like me could, immediately learn how to chop a movie scenes …
To master the basics and edit one video in FLV format it took me about 1 hour of time, as in the beginning it was confusing to get confortable with the program scenes selector.
One downside of LiVES it failure to open a FLV file I wanted to edit.
In order to be able to edit the flv movie hence I first had to convert the FLV to AVI or MPEG, as this two (video multimedia formats) are supported by LiVES video editor.
After completing my video scenes chopping to the AVI file I had to convert back to FLV.
In order to complete the convertion between FLV to AVI format on my Debian Linux, I used a program called avidemux
Avidemux has a nice GUI interface and also like Lives has support for video editting, though I have never succesfully done any video edits with it.
Avidemux IMHO is user (completely intuitive). To convert the FLV to AVI, all I had to do was simply open the file FLV file, press (CTRL+S) select my FLV video file format and select the output file extension format to be AVI.
Further on, used LiVES to cut my desired parts from my video of choice. Once the cuts were complete I saved the new cutted version of video to AVI.
Then I needed the video again in FLV to upload it in Joomla, so used ffmpeg – command line tool to do the AVI to FLV file converstion, like so:
hipo@noah:~$ /usr/bin/ffmpeg -i my_media_file.avi my_video_file.flv
Hope this article helps someone aiming to do basic video editting on Linux with LiVES and just like needed FLV to AVI and AVI to FLV convertions.
Tags: Auto, avi, avi file, avi format, avidemux, BSD, client, client websites, convertion, debian linux, downside, Draft, editing, editor, failure, file, flv file, format, free software program, gui interface, how to convert flv to avi, IMHO, instance, Linux, linux user, Microsoft, microsoft windows os, multimedia formats, nice stuff, piece, selector, simple, software, support, time, video, video editing, video editor, video editting, video multimedia, video scenes, Videos, windows users
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | 1 Comment »
Saturday, April 28th, 2012
When a server hard disk scape gets filled its common that Apache returns empty (no content) pages…
This just happened in one server I administer. To restore the normal server operation I freed some space by deleting old obsolete backups.
Actually the whole reasons for this mess was an enormous backup files, which on the last monthly backup overfilled the disk empty space.
Though, I freed about 400GB of space on the the root filesystem and on a first glimpse the system had plenty of free hard drive space, still restarting the MySQL server refused to start up properly and spit error:
Incorrect key file for table '/tmp/#sql_9315.MYI'; try to repair it" mysql start up error
Besides that there have been corrupted (crashed) tables, which reported next to above error.
Checking in /tmp/#sql_9315.MYI, I couldn't see any MYI – (MyISAM) format file. A quick google look up revealed that this error is caused by not enough disk space. This was puzzling as I can see both /var and / partitions had plenty of space so this shouldn't be a problem. Also manally creating the file /tmp/#sql_9315.MYI with:
server:~# touch /tmp/#sql_9315.MYI
Didn't help it, though the file created fine. Anyways a bit of a closer examination I've noticed a /tmp filesystem mounted besides with the other file system mounts ????
You can guess my great amazement to find this 1 Megabyte only /tmp filesystem hanging on the server mounted on the server.
I didn't mounted this 1 Megabyte filesystem, so it was either an intruder or some kind of "weird" bug…
I digged in Googling to see, if I can find more on the error and found actually the whole mess with this 1 mb mounted /tmp partition is caused by, just recently introduced Debian init script /etc/init.d/mountoverflowtmp.
It seems this script was introduced in Debian newer releases. mountoverflowtmp is some kind of emergency script, which is triggered in case if the root filesystem/ space gets filled.
The script has only two options:
# /etc/init.d/mountoverflowtmp
Usage: mountoverflowtmp [start|stop]
Once started what it does it remounts the /tmp to be 1 megabyte in size and stops its execution like it never run. Well maybe, the developers had something in mind with introducing this script I will not argue. What I should complain though is the script design is completely broken. Once the script gets "activated" and does its job. This 1MB mount stays like this, even if hard disk space is freed on the root partition – / ….
Hence to cope with this unhandy situation, once I had freed disk space on the root partition for some reason mountoverflowtmp stop option was not working,
So I had to initiate "hard" unmount:
server:~# mount -l /tmp
Also as I had a bunch of crashed tables and to fix them, also issued on each of the broken tables reported on /etc/init.d/mysql start start-up.
server:~# mysql -u root -p
mysql> use Database_Name;
mysql> repair table Table_Name extended;
....
Then to finally solve the stupid Incorrect key file for table '/tmp/#sql_XXYYZZ33444.MYI'; try to repair it error, I had to restart once again the SQL server:
Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..
root@server:/etc/init.d#
Tadadadadam!, SQL now loads and works back as before!
Tags: amazement, apache, Auto, backup files, backups, Disk, disk space, Draft, drive, emergency, empty space, file, file tmp, first glimpse, format, free hard drive, free hard drive space, google, googling, hard disk, help, Incorrect, init, intruder, key file, mess, MYI, MyISAM, mysql server, mysqld, operation, partition, quot, root, root filesystem, script, server operation, shouldn, size, something, TABLE, tmp, weird bug
Posted in MySQL, System Administration, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 26th, 2012
In my last article, I've explained How to create PNG, JPG, GIF pictures from one single PDF document
Convertion of PDF to images is useful, however as PNG and JPEG graphic formats are raster graphics the image quality gets crappy if the picture is zoomed to lets say 300%.
This means convertion to PNG / GIF etc. is not a good practice especially if image quality is targetted.
I myself am not a quality freak but it was interesting to find out if it is possible to convert the PDF pages to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) graphics format.
Converting PDF to SVG is very easy as for GNU / Linux there is a command line tool called pdf2svg
pdf2svg's official page is here
The traditional source way compile and install is described on the homepage. For Debian users pdf2svg has already existing a deb package.
To install pdf2svg on Debian use:
debian:~# apt-get install --yes pdf2svg
...
Once installed usage of pdf2svg to convert PDF to multiple SVG files is analogous to imagemagick's convert .
To convert the 44 pages Projects.pdf to multiple SVG pages – (each PDF page to a separate SVG file) issue:
debian:~/project-pdf-to-images$ for i in $(seq 1 44); do \
pdf2svg Projects.pdf Projects-$i.SVG $i; \
done
This little loop tells each page number from the 44 PDF document to be stored in separate SVG vector graphics file:
debian:~/project-pdf-to-images$ ls -1 *.svg|wc -l
44
For BSD users and in particular FreeBSD ones png2svg has a bsd port in:
/usr/ports/graphics/pdf2svg
Installing on BSD is possible directly via the port and convertion of PDF to SVG on FreeBSD, should be working in the same manner. The only requirement is that bash shell is used for the above little bash loop, as by default FreeBSD runs the csh.
On FreeBSD launch /usr/local/bin/bash, before following the Linux instructions if you're not already in bash.
Now the output SVG files are perfect for editting with Inkscape or Scribus and the picture quality is way superior to old rasterized (JPEG, PNG) images
Tags: Auto, bash shell, bsd users, command line tool, Convert, Converting, convertion, crappy, deb, deb package, debian project, debian users, document, documentConvertion, Draft, editting, format, freak, GIF, gnu linux, graphic formats, Graphics, graphics format, graphics graphics, homepage, Image, image quality, ImageMagick, inkscape, issue, JPG, jpg gif, line, Linux, nbsp, number, package, page, pdf document, picture, png, png images, Projects, raster graphics, rasterized, Scalable, scalable vector graphics, Scribus, Shell, svg file, svg files, tool, traditional source, use, vector, way
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, System Administration | No Comments »
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
1. Install the slackware binary package xfce4-screenshooter.
For the latest Slackware Linux release which as of time of writting is 13.37 xfce4-screenshooter-1.7.9-i486-3sl.txz can be download from here
Install of xfce4-screenshooter-1.7.9-i486-3sl.txz is done with slackware's usual installpkg package manager command:
bash-4.1# /sbin/installpkg xfce4-screenshooter-1.7.9-i486-3sl.txz
By the way, I haven't used slackware for a long time so in the mean time since Slackware 13, the default slackware packages format .tgz is now substituted with the newer .txz (better compressed .txz). The old .tgz was simply a tar archive with DEFLATE gzip. The newer .txz packages bundled with newer slackware releases are using the LZMA2 (XZ) chain algorithm for compression. LZMA implies higher compression than even bzip2 and this is the reason why Patrick Volkerding – the one man army man behind Slackware decided to use it.
The reason Vollerding choose using .txz is slackware network distribution will load up less the networks and will take less time for downloading extra slackware packages via the internet. The .txz also reduces slackware main CD size so more packages can be contained in the same 700MB sized slack install CD.
Anyways now back to the installation of xfce-screenshooter.
Once installed to runit use the Xfce menus:
Xfce Menu -> Accesories -> Screenshot
Next you will see the xfce-screenshooter program to pop-up:
To take a snapshot of the screen use:
Entire Screen -> Save
Tags: 3sl, Accesories, algorithm, army man, Auto, binary package, compression, distribution, download, Draft, format, graphical environment, gzip, Install, installation, Linux, long time, LZMA, man army, manager, mean time, menu, menus, nbsp, network distribution, package, reason, screen, size, slack, slackware packages, snapshot, tar archive, tgz, time, txzBy, Vollerding, writting, XFCE, xfce4
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, System Administration | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
I had to create a number of Facebook and Twitter accounts for one of the companies where I am employed. As I had to put Avatars to each and every new account. I therefore had to resize the company logos to fit the to the avatar dimensions..
It took me a bit of research until I found the proper picture dimensions. Here are the dimensions:
For facebook page Avatar the good picture width / height dimensions is a square like:
151x151 pixels
If however you prefer to have a sky scraper picture in Facebook, this is possible as thumbnail pictures up to 180×540 w/h pixels are showing up in FB.
At most cases FaceBook automatically resizes the uploaded picture and generates a thumbnail which in most pictures looks okay, however in some odd picture dimensions the picture preview might be messy, so its better to ship the profile pic in standard square size like 151×151, 256×256, 313×313 etc.
For Twitter page Avatar the fixed picture width / height dimensions is:
73x73 pixels
In Twitter again the avatar picture should be a square like, to have twitter during upload automatically resize and make a good looking pic thumbnail. If some picture with a non square dimensions is uploaded as an Avatar for twitter account usually, twitter's pic auto resize server side program chops parts of the picture. This is not a bug but expected behaviour. In Twitter another requirement is that the uploaded avatar image does not exceed 700kb, trying to puload a picture over 700k fails.
In both Facebook and Twitter the uploaded Avatar logo should be in format JPEG, GIF or PNG .
To resize the company logo pictures for FB and Twitter, I used GIMP 's:
Image -> Scale Image
menus.
I've red some people claiming the size of the Avatar logo in Facebook could have some impact in terms of e-marketing, but I'm not sure if this is a fact or some false rumour. Anyways it is sure that a wide sky scraper like picture allows you to show more even from the profile and maybe through the picture have larger influence over the audience.
Tags: Auto, avatar, avatar image, avatars, behaviour, company logo, company logos, Draft, facebook, false rumour, fb, format, format jpeg, GIF, GIMP, height, height dimensions, Image, image menus, impact, influence, JPEG, logo, marketing, nbsp, non, number, page, picture, pixel, pixelsIf, pixelsIn, png, Profile, puload, requirement, resize, scale, scale image, server side, side, size, sky, sky scraper, square dimensions, thumbnail, twitter, upload, wide sky, width
Posted in Various, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 9th, 2012
I've recently had to set up a backup system to synchronize backup archive files between two remote servers and as I do usually with this situation I just set up a crontab job to periodically execute rsync to copy data from source server to the destination server . Copying SRC to DEST is the default behaviour rsync uses, however in this case I had to copy from the destination server to the source server host (in other words sync files the reversely.
The usual way to copy with rsync via SSH (from SRC to DEST) is using a cmd line like:
debian:~$ /usr/bin/rsync -avz -e ssh backup-user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/backup-user/my-directory .
Where the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is my remote server IP with which files are synched.
According to rsync manual, the proposed docs SYNOPSIS is in the format;
Local: rsync [OPTION...] SRC… [DEST
Obviusly the default way to use rsync is to copy source to destination which I used until now, but in this case I had to the other way around and copy files from a destination host to the source server. It was logical that swapping the SRC and DEST would complete my required task. Anyways I consulted with some rsync gurus in irc.freenode.net , just to make sure it is proper to just swap the SRC, DEST arguments.
I was told this is possible, so I swapped args;
debian:~$ /usr/bin/rsync -avz -e ssh . backup-user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/backup-user/my-directory
...
Surprisingly this worked Anyways I was adviced by by a good guy nick named scheel , that putting -e ssh to command line is generally unnecessery except if there is no some uncommon used SSH port over which the data is transferred. An example case in which -e 'ssh is necessery would be if transferring via lets say SSH port 1234;
rsync -avz -e 'ssh -p1234' /source user@host:/dest
In all other cases omitting '-e ssh' is better as '-e ssh' is rsync default. Therefore my final swapped line I put in cron to copy from a destinatio to source host with rsync looked like so:
05 03 2 * * /usr/bin/ionice -c 3 /usr/bin/rsync -avz my-directory backup-user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/backup-user/ >/dev/null 2>&1
Tags: archive files, Auto, avz, backup system, case, cmd, cmd line, copy, copying, cron, default, default behaviour, destIn, destinatio, destination, destination host, destination server, docs, Draft, example, example case, few words, format, gurus, host, job, nbsp, necessery, nick, option, port 1234, remote server, rsync, scheel, server host, server ip, source host, source server, ssh port, sync files, system, usr bin
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
I've playing trying to learn InkScape – The Open Source vector graphic editor .By so far I'm quite impressed on how easy this program is learned and how easy graphical manipulation with this nifty program can be done.
The default format in which InkScape saves its files is SVG (Scalable Vectors Graphics). For all those unfamiliar with SVG – SVG is an open (free format) format developed in 1999 which insetad of containing binary data like PNG or JPEG does contain plain XML content. SVG being consisted of plain XML has multiple advantageous, the most important one makes it easy for text and visual data to be displayed among different program svg readers in absolutely identical way. Besides that the format if read with plain text editor like vim or emacs can be altered directly via the source.
Being multi system interoperable makes SVG as a great format for text and visual data storage in HTML5, actually SVG is already a part of the HTML5 html coding standard. And most probably its adoption rate will raise up drastically as soon as HTML5 starts substitute HTML4 and lower web standards.
Anyways I'm slipping away from the aim of this post so I'll stop blabbering on how great SVG is and let people check it out for themselves (if not already).
Going back to the aim of my article to show How to convert SVG to PNG graphical extension on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD
After producing a bunch of files with InkScape I realized the default format in which Inkscape stores its files is SVG , this was okay with me but since I wanted to have my experimental produced content in PNG I needed a way to convert SVG to
My first logical guess was that The Gimp will be able to handle the situation and after opening my SVG file with GIMP and used the gimp File -> Save As option and give the SVGfile an extension of PNG , Gimp succesfully converted the file to PNG.
However I wanted to dig further and check out what is the standard accepted way to convert SVG files using a plain command. This will possibly be handy to me if I had to do something online (let's say a website) which will accept SVG and will require the SVG files to be converted and also stored in PNG or other Graphic file formats.
After checking online, I've found a post which pointed me to librsvg2 which contains RSVG – (Turn SVG files into raster images.)
librsvg is available as a package in most mainstream Linux distributions nowdays, Fedora, Debian etc., as well as contains a port inside the FreeBSD ports system. Since I'm using Debian on my notebook where I installed and tested the command line SVG to PNG convertion the way I did it is:
noah:/home/hipo/Desktop# apt-get --yes install librsvg2-bin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
librsvg2-bin
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 16 not upgraded.
Need to get 72.5 kB of archives.
After this operation, 180 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main librsvg2-bin amd64 2.26.3-1 [72.5 kB]
Fetched 72.5 kB in 0s (184 kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package librsvg2-bin.
(Reading database ... 376046 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking librsvg2-bin (from .../librsvg2-bin_2.26.3-1_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up librsvg2-bin (2.26.3-1) ...
Afterwards the exact convertion of my Inscape SVG file drawing.svg to drawing.png using rsvg I've done like so:
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ rsvg drawing.svg drawing.png
The convertion results for me was 100% uniqueness between the file converted and the output PNG. Some people might wonder why I didn't used Inkscape's Export to Bitmap function and then use convert command part of ImageMagick in order to convert the produced Inkscape bitmap to PNG.
One other thing worthy to mention is on Debian, librsvg2-bin contains 2 more executable besides rsvg. One is the rsvg-view command which allows one to view SVG files using command line or Graphic enviroment, the other one is rsvg-convert which supports again SVG convertion to PDF and to PNG
Before proceeding with the other described ways to convert SVG to PNG earlier in this article, I give a try to Inkscape's Export to Bitmap embedded function but the produced bitmap did not resembled the original SVG file so I decided to completely abandon this method
Maybe there is some particular reason of the chaotic way I've tested Inkscape to place random images sometimes going out of the field of a paper etc. which influenced the improper generation of Bitmap using Inkscape, despite that it seems InkScape needs some more development until the bugs in Bitmap producing get fixed and it can be freely used to produce Bitmaps.
Maybe there is some particular reason for the failure of Inkscape to produce a good BMP file, like for example the chaotic way I've tested Inkscape to place random images sometimes going out of the field of a paper borders etc.This should have influenced the improper generation of Bitmap using Inkscape, anyhow it seems InkScape needs some more development until the bugs in Bitmap creation get fixed.
By the way if you're wondering how to convert PNG to bitmap BMP after, once having converted SVG to PNG this is easily doable with convert command, like so:
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ convert drawing.png drawing.bmp
Maybe in future releases it will be a good idea if InkScape developers integrate a convertion to other formats this will make it handy and make surely these nice program more popular among users. Hope this is helpful. Cheers and as RMS likes to say Happy Hacking
Tags: adoption rate, binary data, bitmap, convertion, data storage, default format, Desktop, emacs, export, file, format, function, GIMP, gnu linux, graphic editor, graphic formats, graphical extension, graphical manipulation, Graphics, hipo, HTML, inkscape, interoperable, librsvg, nbsp, nifty program, noah, Open, package, png, Scalable, source vector, substitute, svg file, text, Vectors, vim, xml content
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, Various | 2 Comments »
on 
on 