Just to show a few examples how to combine pdf files. Let us assume we have three pdf  files and now we need to combine them:

• gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=finalcombinedpdf.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf
• joinpdf myfinalFile.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf
• pdfmeld file1.pdf, file2.pdf, file3.pdf resultcombinedfile.pdf

Some of the other tools available for merging PDF files include pfdtk, Multivalent, and pdcat.

* Ghostscript - A popular tool for viewing Postscript and PDF documents
* joinPDF - A simple, yet effective, PDF merging tool
* pdfmeld - A powerful tool for combining PDF files

Just wanna say Hi on Planet SUSE!!
This is my first post there, I'm a member of the GNOME Team trying to do the best i know, in my free time, to improve the GNOME Desktop.
I don't work for Novell i'm just having some fun contributing for GNOME.
Some things about me here.

During the “cleanup” of the HP-Education repository, I used a very interesting feature of the openSUSE Build Service: linking against revisions.

Sometimes, you want to patch a package from another repository to build with special features enabled or disabled. The Build Service allows you to link the package from this other repository (and avoid wasting space by duplicating the sources) and add your patches.

Now think about a patch against a special version of a package – and you know that you don’t want a package with a newer version in your repository for a foreseeable time. But if you use the plain link command of the Build Service, the linked package in your repository will get updated if the original package in the original project is updated.

Luckily, the buildservice allows you to link against a “frozen” state of a package: it’s source-revision. People already knowing any revision control systems like Subversion also know that the revision of a source is increased each time, a new change is submitted. And that’s what we need now: link against a special revision of the package from the other repository and apply our patch against it. The webclient currently doesn’t support such special features, but with osc it’s very easy.

First, check the needed revision in the original project:

cd Education/MultiplicationStation
osc info


Project name: Education
Package name: MultiplicationStation
Path: /home/data/SVN/Education/MultiplicationStation
API URL: https://api.opensuse.org
Source URL: https://api.opensuse.org/source/Education/MultiplicationStation
srcmd5: 484c329659d613e3bbdd515a1a8d1099
Revision: 10
Link info: None

Now create a link with this (or any further) revision to your new project:

osc linkpac -r 10 Education MultiplicationStation isv:hp:education

..and in the resulting “_link” file in your new project, you’ll find:

<link project="Education" package="MultiplicationStation" rev="10">
<patches>
<!-- <apply name="patch" /> -->
<!-- <topadd>%define build_with_feature_x 1</topadd> -->
</patches>
</link>

So your linked package will always use the source revision 10 of the original project. Let’s start applying patches…

In January 2009, the openSUSE forums achieved the highest user activity ever since the launch in June 2008. The user activity measures the number of individual visits and is therefore an indicator for the vitality of the openSUSE forums.

Up to the 31st of January 2009, we achieved a membership of 21.322 (+2.550) members, 21.073 (+2.929) threads and 122.695 (+17.492) posts. The number in brackets shows the increase of the corresponding measurement compared to the last snapshot taken on the 31st of December 2008. Most users ever online still was 7.771 on the 2nd of December 2008.

The following diagram shows the monthly development of new user registrations, user activity, new threads and new posts since the launch in June 2008. We experienced 15.104 individual visits to the openSUSE forums in January 2009, which is an increase of 14% compared to December 2008 and is even 25% above average.

Kudos to our Top5 posters during January 2009

• caf4926 – 575
• ken_yap – 455
• oldcpu – 439
• Malcolm – 405
• Axeia – 405

Thanks as usual for making the openSUSE forums a worthwhile place to be.

Any comments about the OSF status reports are much appreciated by the openSUSE forums team.

Please join us for the GNOME Team meeting in #openSUSE-GNOME on
irc.freenode.net.

The current agenda can be found here:
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Meetings/20090205

For time conversions, please see:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=22&month=1&year=2009&hour=22&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

Thanks!

There’s been some discussion about Rails on openSUSE recently, so I thought I’d add to my Ruby articles with a Rails installation guide.

Getting started with Rails on openSUSE is a breeze.  In this particular article, I’ll quickly outline installation and startup of Rails on openSUSE 11.1.  You’ll need to install Ruby, ruby-sqlite, and ruby gems.  I’ve detailed these in my previous articles on ruby.

This is far easier than you might expect, so lets get started…

Use ruby gems to install Rails:

sudo gem install rails

That’s it!  After some work, Rails should be all installed and ready to go.  You can test it out by creating a new project:

rails foobar

And running the server script, then visit http://localhost:3000 in your web browser to verify that all is well:

cd foobar && ruby script/server

Note that this installation will use sqlite3 as it’s database by default if you’ve been following my other tutorials.  There’s information about getting Rails to work with MySQL (and other databases/platforms) over at the Rails Wiki:  http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtosInstallation

Yeah the GNOME Team is already working hard on the 2.25.90 release. It will be a long day and we expect to end it with all the release done.
Vincent mentioned us (me, Magnus and Suman) but he is also doing an excelent working reviewing packages and upstreaming lot's of old patches.

After today (if everything went as expected) i'm going to make a SUSE Studio image so you can boot it as a livecd and VMware appliance. So you can test GNOME 2.25.90 on your desktop.

Come join us at #opensuse-gnome @ irc.freenode.net

PS: You can even get there and just say "Hi" or "How GNOME is cool!"

Spent the last days fixing Wine issues after a new Coverity run. Submitted ca 35 patches in a hack frenzy, but only 14 got in for now. But Wine is at 0 UNINSPECTED issues now!

GPhoto hacking wise not much work done.

Oh, and I bought a Nikon D90 (to upgrade the D70s) and a 50mm/1.8 lens (for better photos). Hopefully better photos will happen. :)


I will be on FOSDEM 2009 on the weekend, hold a talk on Wine and hang around the openSUSE booth. If you have cameras able to remote control drop by for debugging :)

Desktop files contain a lot of information about KDE/Gnome/X11 applications (e.g. names, icons).

Displaying this data in the package selector allows to provide a more detailed package description. The user can easily see which applications are included in an installed package.

Running these applications via mouse click is technically possible, but unfortunately security concerns don’t allow it. Please let me know if you have an idea how to solve this issue.

Today, I’d like to mention another rather hidden feature of openSUSE 11.1. The package management is finally able to keep multiple versions of packages, if they support installation of parallel versions. A typical example of this is of course kernel. A lot of people want to keep the old, functional, kernel around when installing a kernel update and now there is a way to do it.

Open /etc/zypp/zypp.conf in your favorite editor and change this value:

multiversion = kernel-default,kernel-default-extra,kernel-default-base,kernel-source

The list contains names of packages to be installed via ‘rpm -i’ instead of ‘rpm -U’. Just adopt it to your the kernel flavor you are using.

Of course, there is a catch – there are no means to limit the number of package versions to be installed this way. The reasoning is that there is no automatic way to guess which versions to remove (in case of kernel, everyone has its own definition of working kernel) So you have to uninstall additional kernels you don’t need anymore manually.

Enjoy!