LibreOffice – Don's House of Fine Patisseries

December 1, 2024December 1, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 7: Desktop applications

Previous chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

Using your computer of course requires some software beyond the base operating system; fortunately, most desktop linux distributions not only have repositories of freely installable software, often more common software as decided by the distro’s maintainers are pre-installed on the system at the same time as system installation.

This post is concentrating on the popular office suite LibreOffice which includes a drawing program, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, and a database application. While this post will show a few functions of each part, it is in no way intended to be a tutorial, but rather a cursory demonstration of each, leaving the exploration of each to you, the reader.

In this post I occasionally refer to operating systems beyond Linux. Also, contrary to my usual habit of not editorializing in this series, I offer the following: Many Linux software suites are largely, although importantly, not completely compatible with other known equivalents on other systems. They will often be able to open and edit files created by them; however, the compatibility and drop-in replacement value of each piece of software for the other (regardless of in which order) is often variable, sometimes quite substantially.

Note that occasionally, some screenshots were taken at different times for the sake of completeness, but presented in the order seen here, for the sake of the narrative.

Pinning Apps to the Dock:

Start from the Activities (hot corner in the upper left hand corner (the horizontal bar; either just quickly move the mouse there, or if necessary, click on the the horizontal bar):

I searched for “Lib” which brought up three of LibreOffice’s apps: Writer, Calc, and Impress, and I right clicked each one …

Searching for installed LibreOffice components

… each of which I pinned to the dock at the bottom, one at a time:

Templates:

Note: In this post, the use of existing document templates found on the internet will be generously relied upon in order to demonstrate in a cursory fashion some of the resources available to desktop users — both of free software packages and other systems as well — as well as to simplify the mounting and development of the narrative using said existing documents. The site www.freedesktop.org, by happenstance, is frequently used, as is the templates section of www.libreoffice.org. Of note, especially on the former site, there are a number of templates which are in languages other than English, and some which have been on the site for several years, using older formats. Hopefully, the language barriers as the cases may be will not be too difficult to surmount given online translation services, while the older file formats are normally seamlessly supported by current software suites, with the ability to save in modern formats.

Users are of course free to create documents from scratch as they would on any system.

Going back to the activities screen, choose the Firefox icon (orange and blue, on the left at the bottom):

In the address bar, enter the address of a search engine, such as www.duckduckgo.com:

Search for templates. In this case, I specifically asked for templates appropriate for LibreOffice, which brought me to www.opendesktop.org:

In the search bar, I searched for LibreOffice, which gave me the following options:

… and chose for ODF Text Templates (for word processessing):

Browsing through the templates, I chose a CV template, for “Tux the Penguin — Brand Ambassador and Mascot”:

… which I downloaded:

On the activities screen, I opened up the Files application:

Drawing:

… and this is where I learned that the downloaded CV template was not what it seemed. 🙂

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured drawing software. One such piece is LibreOffice Draw, which functions similarly to Microsoft Visio, allowing for some basic-to-not-so basic graphical manipulations, editing, basic draughting, and inserting texts.

From the Files program just opened, I navigated to the Downloads directory, where the CV was located after downloading, and despite having believed that the CV I had downloaded was a text document, the file format in fact proved to be a drawing format:

I double-clicked on the CV file, which, since LibreOffice Draw isn’t always a part of a Fedora base installation, launched the software store, and having found LibreOffice Draw in the Fedora repositories, offered to install it, which I accepted:

CV file double-clicked, launching the software store in order to install required software

Once LibreOffice Draw had been installed, I asked that it be launched:

After closing the offer to see the “What’s New” notes, I went to the File dropdown menu to open the file:

… and navigated over to the Downloads directory, where the CV was located.

I clicked on the CV file to open it:

In Draw — depending on the nature of the input file — various existing texts can be modified, as well as many basic-to-not-so-basic graphical manipulations. In the case of this file, the file was designed such that the text could be modified:

To manipulate images, the picture of Tux (the penguin) was double-clicked to select it, the right mouse button was clicked, and the “Rotate or Flip” option was selected:

… and I chose to flip the picture of Tux upside-down:

Some modestly — or more complex — drawings, including multimedia documents such as the CV shown above, can be created and / or modified, which I leave to the reader to explore.

Word Processor:

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured word processing software suites. One of the more popular such pieces is LibreOffice Writer.

I returned to the opendesktop.org website, and chose a business card template to open in a word processor — LibreOffice Writer.

I navigated to find a business card template:

opendesktop.org template for business cards

… and downloaded the file:

Similar to how the CV above was opened, the business card template was opened, without having to go through the installation of LibreOffice Writer:

Business card template opened in LibreOffice Writer

The text of the first card was changed to a “Desktop Linux: Revealed” theme:

Name and contact details on first card changed

The modifications were also saved:

Returning to the opendesktop.org templates, I chose the “Organica Business Forms” to download:

The page for the Organica Business Forms was opened:

… and the file downloaded:

Template downloaded and directory opened

The business forms were compressed in the .tar format, analogous to .zip files:

Directory with downloaded file, which was double clicked

The archive was double-clicked, revealing a directory contained within:

.tar file double clicked, opening up the archive

The directory was double-clicked, revealing several templates: Business cards (different from above), a fax cover sheet, four different kinds and sizes of labels, an invoice, and a letter:

Going back to Writer, the letter file was double-clicked, which again opened the file in LibreOffice Writer:

A space was added between two paragraphs:

The “Table” drop down menu was opened:

… and the “Insert Table” option was chosen:

… which opened up a window to determine some settings for the table to be inserted:

Window opened to set table characteristics

A table with five columns and five rows was selected:

The table was selected, and the right mouse button was clicked, revealing a contextual menu:

The option “Table Properties” was selected, bringing up a window:

The button for all lines under “Line Arrangement” was chosen in the Borders tab, in order to insert borders around all the cells of the table:

The “Ok” button was pressed, returning me to the document, showing now all the cells of the table with borders:

Text was added to a cell in the upper left hand corner (“Linux Desktop”):

A number of other cells were filled in:

The “File” drop down menu was opened:

… and the file was saved:

As with the previous section, I leave it to the reader to further explore LibreOffice Writer to see the various options in the various menus, and the various kinds of text documents that can be created.

Spreadsheets:

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured spreadsheet software. One of the most popular such pieces is LibreOffice Calc.

After saving the business cards, I returned to the freedesktop.org website, browsing the spreadsheet templates:

opendesktop.org page sorting for spreadsheets

I chose the Amortization Schedule:

opendesktop.org page with amortization schedule

The amortization Schedule was downloaded:

Similarly to previous files, the Amortization Schedule was opened (file double clicked in the file download directory).

Amortization schedule opened in LibreOffice Calc

Several of the balance figures was selected, revealing how the value us calculated in the formula bar:

Amortization schedule, cell calculation revealed

I chose to modify the table, by adding a value of 1000 in the “Extra Principle Payment”, to change the values of “New Balance” …

… and then I changed the value to 500 to see how it affected the values of “New Balance”.

Again I leave it to the reader to further explore mounting spreadsheets of their own using their own data.

Slide Shows / Presentations

At the opendesktop.org collection of templates, I chose a slide show template to download:

opendesktop.org page sorting for a presentation template

I chose a template to download …

… and downloaded it:

Again through the files directory, I double-clicked on the downloaded file:

File in download directory double clicked

… which opened up the file in LibreOffice Impress:

Presentation opened in LibreOffice Impress

I began editing the title line — in the process, using the wrong branding for this series!

The text colour, white, didn’t have enough contrast for my taste, so I selected the text …

… and went into the options area on the right to by clicking on the letter “A” with a red underline, to change the font colour:

Text colour changed through menu icons on the right

The font colour was changed to a greenish-blue colour:

Other text was changed and added:

I changed to the second page, and similarly started to change the text:

Text can be changed as per your needs, as well as pages added through copy / paste or other wizards available.

The drop-down file menu was chosen, so that I could save the file:

Once the file was saved, I opened up the drop-down file menu again, and chose “Export As” so that I could export the file as a PDF. (Editorial note: As mentioned earlier, while there is a good amount of compatibility between LibreOffice and other office suites, it can be disappointingly incomplete, which I have particularly seen and experienced with — but not only — slide shows. For more of a discussion of such from the perspective of the usefulness of PDFs, please see my post on the subject.)

The file drop-down menu was clicked again, and the option “Export As” was clicked:

File menu opened to export the file as a PDF

Exporting to PDFs can be rather easy and direct, or, as I am going to show a little bit here, allows for a large amount of choices …

… including protecting PDFs with passwords for opening:

Tab with options for password setting for opening PDFs

Passwords were set for both opening as well as for “permission” which means to allow editing of the PDF (see my post on the subject), and the slide show was exported as a PDF:

… and the OK button was clicked:

As usual, I leave to the reader to explore further. Also, within LibreOffice itself it has a wizard to help the user create a number of presentations with various backgrounds and layouts.

Database:

LibreOffice also includes a database module, called “Base”, which is similar to Microsoft Access; it is essentially a front end manager — a gui interface — for the actual database software behind it that it leverages.

Before I show a properly mounted database, I will show some screenshots about how to start.

Starting from the home screen, the activities corner (hot corner) in the upper left was clicked:

On the Activies screen, “libreoffice base” was typed into the search bar, and the option to install LibreOffice Base, which is not always installed in a base install, was offered:

Activities screen accessed, and “libreoffice base” searched for; the option to install Base was offered

The option was double-clicked, which brought up the “software store” with the choice of LibreOffice Base …

Software store opened to allow for installation of Base

I double-clicked on the option, bringing up the information page on the package and the offer to install it:

I clicked the “Install” button:

Once LibreOffice Base was installed, an “Open” button presented itself:

The “Open” button was clicked, lauching LibreOffice:

A wizard came up to select a database:

Wizard opened to allow choice to launch Base

The presented option was accepted, and the “Next>” button was clicked, bringing up a “Save and proceed” window:

The “Finish” button was clicked, opening a Save window:

Finish button clicked, allowing for the creation of a database

Once that was done, the following screen came up, in order to start creating a database:

Note that from this point on, I am showing some very basic things, and I will soon recommend a tutorial, which will better show how to use the software than I could ever present.

I clicked on the “Table” icon, which brought up a Table Wizard:

I chose the “Personal” category, on the premise — in the context of this post, anyway which presumes that many readers may be seeking to use linux at home and not just at the office, and that a database might not as easily appear to be a personal piece of software.

I pulled down the suggested list of topics:

… and chose “Recipes” for what I presume are obvious reasons — we all eat, and presumably many people have a personal collection of varying sizes (here’s my collection of recipes, incidentally NOT in a database format, at https://www.malak.ca/food).

Some field names were suggested:

I clicked on “Name”:

… which moved it over to the column on the right:

I also chose other sample tables:

… at which point, I clicked on the “Finish” button, leading to the following screen:

Finish button clicked, leading to a data entry page

I started entering data:

I chose to save my changes:

At this point, I am going to direct you to a far better tutorial than I could ever present, even in the most cursory of fashions:

As of the writing of this post, a rather complete tutorial on using Base can be found at thefrugalcomputerguy.com/seriespg.php?ser=15/ (no doubt amongst countless other similarly excellent resources):

TheFrugalComputerGuy.com LibreOffice Base tutorial page

Although I think it best to leave the tutorial to TheFrugalComputerGuy, I will show a small database in action:

Starting again at the desktop screen:

The activities screen was accessed through the upper left hand hot corner with the mouse:

The Firefox icon (orange, on the left on the dock at the bottom) was clicked:

I went to my favourite search engine, duckduckgo.com:

Search engine opened (in this case www.duckduckgo.com)

… and I searched for “libreoffice base templates”:

I chose the “Templates & Extensions” link, the second link above, at the LibreOffice.org site itself:

I clicked on the green “plus” sign to the right of “Boost your creativity with templates”:

… which led to the following page:

On the left, there are a number of filters under “Add tag filters:”, and clicked on “Base”, bringing up the following page:

I chose the “MyRecipes” template for LibreOffice Base:

I scrolled down to quickly assess the files, finding them eminently interesting for the task at hand:

The download button was clicked, and the file downloaded:

The files program was opened, and the newly downloaded file was highlighted:

The .zip file was double-clicked, creating a directory of the files (ok I accidentally created the directory three times!)

One of the directories was double-clicked and opened:

The “ReadMe.txt” file was double-clicked and opened:

The .odt file was opened as well:

Instructions and general description file checked

The “MyRecipes1.jpg” file was double-clicked, opening a screenshot:

Screenshot of database operating consulted

The FoodPix directory was opened, showing pictures of the recipes in the database:

From the database’s main directory, the database was opened:

After looking about, the “UpdateRecipes” option was selected:

Which opened up one of the recipes:

The database author chose to have an active Pantry list with checkable items, no doubt based at least partly on their recipes; by having it dynamic, when asked to create purchasing lists, the database can exclude pantry items already on hand:

Said shopping lists can be generated from the “1MainMenuSwitchboard” option:

Main menu switchboard created by the author to navigate through their recipes and other functions they programmed

Given that the “switchboard” is based on macros, the Tools pull down menu was opened::

… and the “Options” option was clicked:

“Options” option clicked, opening an options window

The Security option was chosen:

… and the “Macro Security” button was clicked. The security level was set to low, as per the author’s suggestion:

Back to the Switchboard:

The “Mark Recipe List” button was clicked, and I decided to mark three of the recipes:

In trying to close the window, a window asked if I wanted to save my changes, to which I clicked “yes”.

The “Grocery List for Marked Recipes” button was clicked:

Grocery list option chosen from main menu

… producing a grocery list based on the recipes, which was automatically opened in LibreOffice Writer:

Grocery list created for the selected recipes

The next chapter will look at graphics.

August 20, 2024October 18, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 5: Gnome Extensions, and Basic File Management

Previous Chapter: Desktop Linux Unveiled : Chapter 4: Installing Linux

In this chapter, Gnome Extensions will be briefly discussed, and basic file transfers and manipulation will be highlighted.

Gnome Extensions

Gnome was designed to be extensible, or have its behaviour be changed with extensions. There are hundreds of extensions, most produced by volunteer programmers.

Launch Firefox from the dock at the bottom of the screen (the icon at the left). Firefox will launch, leading to the Fedora Project main page (a setting you may wish to keep, or change at a later time.)

In the navigation bar, enter the site https://extensions.gnome.org. (Some distributions may manage extensions locally; Fedora has opted to only do so partially.)

Click on the link “Click here to install browser extensions”, which will eventually allow for the installation of the Gnome Shell integration tool.

Click on “Add”:

I recommend that you click on “Allow this extension to run in Private Windows” and press “okay”.

As of when the following screenshot was taken, here is page one of the available extensions, along with a brief description:

To install an extension that interests you, click on the black switch that will be set to “Off”.

Click on “Install”:

Sometimes, an extension will be incompatible with the current version of Gnome, and the page will say as much:

When you have selected all the extensions which interest you, close Firefox:

Basic file manipulation:

Starting from the main screen, click on the activities bar in the upper left hand corner:

… leading to the activities screen, with the dock:

Click on the blue rectangle meant to resemble a filing cabinet, in the centre.

For convenience, I moved the window to the left, and it “snapped” to take up half the screen:

The activities screen was accessed again, to access the dock, and right-clicking on the file manager icon:

Choose “New Window”, in order to launch a second file manager window:

The size and location of the second window were adjusted in order to have a second window on the right:

Before moving on, I am going to point out that I personally like file listings with full information; however, files can be displayed with previews (the following shots were taken after the following operations were completed):

By hovering the pointer over a button with four blocks in it, you can toggle between lists and icons:

Clicking on the icon will change the filenames to icon size:

Hovering over the same square icon can revert to a list view.

At this point, you can insert a USB key with some files or a backup, or a CD/DVD drive, or a portable USB hard drive.

In this case, I decided to copy some files from the computer hosting my website, and some file backups. Clicking on “+ Other Locations” reveals, as per the window on the right, access to other computers accessible to your computer:

I entered into the address bar at the bottom of the window the address of my website, and telling the file manager to use the ssh protocol to securely access the location:

As part of the initial connection, my computer asked me to confirm if I wanted the connection, since it was the first time this instance was connecting to my website. Should you get such a challenge, click on “Log In Anyway”:

My website server presented an authentication challenge:

I entered my username and password, chose “Remember password until you logout”, and clicked on “Connect” (you may choose either of the two other options, at your discretion):

Once there, I navigated to a directory with some photos from a past birthday celebration for my grandmother:

Wishing to copy all the files on my server (on the right) over to the computer (on the left), the first file was selected by clicking on it …

… and then scrolling down to the bottom of the file list, and while pressing on the CTRL key, clicking on the last:

Instead of drag and drop, I right clicked my mouse over the right …

… which opened a contextual menu, in which I chose to create a folder, leading to the opening of a dialog:

A name for a new directory, in this case reflecting that it was from my grandmother’s birthday one year, was entered into the dialogue, and the directory was created:

The previously selected files on my server were transferred via “drag and drop” to the newly created directory:

A photo was selected, and a right click opened a contextual menu, offering a number of options. The first, “Open With Image Viewer”, was selected …

… opening the selected photo.

On the local machine, I clicked on “Home” …

… then on “Documents”, while on my server, I navigated to another directory where I chose a PDF document:

This time, I used a right-clicked contextual menu on my server side to chose “Copy To” to copy the document over to my local machine.

The file was then selected, and a contextual menu (right click) was opened, which offered “Open with Document Viewer”:

… opening up the document, in this case about how to make a backwoods washing machine:

Again on my server, I navigated to another directory, this time in my backups:

… and selected another file to transfer, in this case, a spreadsheet:

The spreadsheet was dragged and dropped onto the local machine:

Recognizing the file extension as that of an OpenDocument spreadsheet file, LibreOffice was launched:

… and the file was opened, in this case, for a table of prices for a number of items I sell at a flea market near my cottage:

Back to the file transfers, a video file in a directory with pictures and videos of my cat was selected …

… and dragged and dropped over to the local machine, and the file selected and right clicked, revealing a contextual menu, allowing for the opening of the video file:

The Gnome Videos player was opened; since the relevant codec had not been installed in the base install, Videos asked if it should attempt to install the codec, which it proposed might be available in the software repositories:

The “Find in Software” button was clicked, leading to the following window:

The required codec (“GStreamer Multimedia Codecs – H.264”) was chosen for installation; once installed, a video of my cat, playing with a feather toy, was shown:

Another file, another spreadsheet, was selected on my server …

… and dragged over to the new setup:

Using a right click contextual menu, the new selected file was opened:

… revealing my shopping plans for a large amount of soup I was going to cook for a community meal:

Another file, a text file, was selected on my server …

… and dragged over to the new setup:

Using a right click contextual menu, the new selected file was opened:

… and a text editor window opened up with the text file:

Many other things can be done with the file manager, including launching template documents in a click if templates have been placed in a templates directory.

Next Chapter:

Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

April 5, 2022April 7, 2022

Overview of Open Source / Free Software for PDF files

This post is a translation of and (somewhat of an) adaptation, as well as slight update, of a presentation I gave in November, 2021, at a meeting of my local Linux Meetup. This adaptation includes some extra limited mockups of demonstrations performed live during the presentation.

The presentation was put together using Fedora Workstation (a general purpose version of Linux, in this case specializing in being a desktop workstation), highlighting some software either installed by default, or available in the Fedora Linux and rpmfusion software repositories (“App Stores”). It is therefore not intended to be a complete exposé on all available open source / free software options for PDF, even under Fedora Linux, let alone GNU / Linux in general, or other systems.

It should be noted that the presentation’s original target audience was a French-speaking group of Linux enthusiasts, Linux professionals, and other IT enthusiasts and professionals familiar with Linux. Most of the listed software would typically be available in standard or easily accessible Linux software repositories (“App Stores”). Beyond the world of GNU / Linux, free software is generally available for use on other systems, and, barring instances of a specific given package offered with paid warranty support, are usually also free of charge to download, install, and use.

In the case of the software highlighted in this post, all are either free-of-charge, or represent the free-of-charge version.

The Value of a PDF File

Context / Situation:

Take the case of the exchange of a document between two computers — such as between one running Linux, and another running Windows (or vice-versa) — and each computer is endowed with a different office suite, such as LibreOffice (cross-platform) on one, and Microsoft Office (Windows / Mac) on the other. (Of course, other possibilities exist, such as Calligra Suite (cross-platform), Pages / Numbers / Keynote / etc. (Mac), Corel Wordperfect, Google Docs, etc.)

LibreOffice, and in days gone by, OpenOffice.org, have long been touted as being “compatible” with MS Office; this purported compatibility, however, is disappointingly nowhere near as good as I and many others would like to believe.

As such, each user will open the shared document, which will be displayed according to each suite’s interpretation of the file, and may find that the actual displayed content on their screen could be different — sometimes substantially so — from the intended original display of the document. Text lines may be cut off; fonts may not be available on one or more of the systems, causing font substitution; font sizes may be changed, or text size may be different while substituting a different font due to the lack of the specified font; certain symbols may not be available on some systems; table effects may not work, or objects inserted into tables may not function or be displayed as expected, such as the insertion of a spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, I would estimate that said disappointing lack of “complete and perfect” “drop-in replacement” compatibility is a very common experience in comparing many well-known pieces of proprietary software and their open-source counterparts — not just LibreOffice and MS Office. Personally, as a Linux user, I have experienced this lack of complete compatibility a number of times since beginning to use OpenOffice.org in 2005 and Linux in 2006. Since then, I have also seen the incompatibility in action on a number of occasions during varying presentations under completely unrelated circumstances in which the presentation files were produced in one suite, and attempts made to show them in another were met with varying degrees of disappointment, sometimes leading to complete failure.

Example PDF

The PDF at this link is a somewhat varied although basic document created for this presentation (you will need a PDF viewer); images of the PDF are shown below. It was developed in order to use throughout the presentation as an example PDF to demonstrate the various given points at hand. It should be noted that the PDF was written in French because the presentation’s original target audience was French-speaking.

The following four images are jpeg images of the pages of the PDF document linked to above, and which I created in LibreOffice Presentation. It should be noted that, for the sake of argument, the pages could have been created in another format, such as a word processor, a spreadsheet program, or a drawing program, for instance.

Page 1 — Song lyrics to be displayed for a Karaoke Night

Page 1, the lyrics to a French song, such as one might want to display during a karaoke event among friends

Page 2 — Expenses list for a Luncheon

Page 2, a fictitious list of expenses for a luncheon

Page 3 — TV Listings

Page 3, a fictitious TV listing for an evening, with some Linux in-jokes and some in-jokes specific to the original audience

Page 4 — Flea Market Poster

Page 4, a fictitious flyer for a local flea market

The above document — represented here in jpeg format directly produced from a PDF of the document — was originally prepared in LibreOffice Presentation, and therefore correctly represented the original document.

However, the following four images are jpeg images of the pages of the PDF document I created in Microsoft PowerPoint (you will need a PDF viewer) into which I imported the original LibreOffice Presentation, in order to demonstrate the relative lack of compatibility between, at least in this case, LibreOffice Presentation and Microsoft Powerpoint.

Page 1 — Song lyrics to be displayed for a Karaoke Night

Changes: Text fonts and font sizes, causing text to be cut off the page

Page 1, note the changes in fonts and font sizes

Page 2 — Expenses list for a Luncheon

Changes: Text fonts, and improper translation of symbols

Page 2, note the changes in fonts, font sizes, and improper translation of symbols

Page 3 — TV Listings

Changes: text fonts, font sizes, and lack of background colours in the various cells

Page 3, note the changes in fonts, font sizes, and lack of background colours in the various cells

Page 4 — Flea Market Poster

Changes: Text fonts, font sizes, corrupted translation of spreadsheet table in the centre of the flyer

Page 4, note the changes in fonts, font sizes, and the completely corrupted translation of the spreadsheet table in the centre of the flyer

The value of a PDF:

PDF files are generally well supported across multiple platforms and software, generally regardless of platform, and will usually be displayed in a virtually identical fashion on all systems; in the case of discrepancies, they are usually inconsequential.

However:

There exists a certain perception that, short of having Adobe Acrobat Pro (a commercial, closed source piece software), PDF files are difficult to edit and modify, allowing for a certain view that PDF files are more secure. This is a case of “security by obscurity”, since editing and modification may be performed by many pieces of software, besides but of course including Adobe Acrobat Pro.

PDF files may also benefit from a perception of being less susceptible to viruses and malware, such as through macros. Suspicious files, regardless of format, should always be checked when there is reasonable doubt, particularly under certain environments.

Warning:

Be careful when using some PDF software downloaded from random websites on the internet, or websites which advertise PDF modification: The may add watermarks to the resulting file — this may be undesirable, and embarrassing, particularly if the software, website, or their output aren’t vetted prior to distributing the resulting file.

PDF Software which adds a watermark to edited watermarks when using an unregistered version

Further, websites providing PDF editing services may have very reasonable terms of service for editing your document, limiting their responsibilities toward you. By submitting a document to an external website, it may may not be able to protect personal privacy, nor be able to guarantee to not divulge commercial or industrial secrets or confidential personal information contained in the submitted document: They may become the victim of a hacking, or become the target of legal proceedings, not to mention potential dubious or unscrupulous intentions operators might have to begin with. Or, they may simply be unwilling to formally engage in such responsibilities in the absence of a paid service contract.

Sample from a website listing their conditions of use

This article’s objectives therefore are:

Firstly, presenting the utility of PDF as a useful format for distributing documents to a wide audience, without having to concern oneself with what software individual audience members may or may not have access to, if at all, and regardless of reason(s);
Secondly, presenting safe, free software and open-source software options for using and editing of PDF files;
Thirdly, beyond the general promotion of free and open-source software and PDF editing, this article is not about promoting nor deriding particular OSes or software packages, or strictly speaking their strengths or weaknesses.

As such, if a particular system or software package suits your needs and / or purposes, you should use it.

However, if a given preferred solution is costly software, perhaps your organization (or your family) may find it to be financially worthwhile to only purchase a minimum number of licences and only install it on a minimum number of designated computers, instead of needlessly on every computer in your organization (or family).

A simple cost / benefit analysis would be worthwhile: You should consider whether you wish to pay $5, $10, $15, or more, on a recurring basis (perhaps monthly), per computer on which such software would be installed. The costs, be they one-time costs or recurring, should be considered against how often the software may be used, perhaps in some cases only once or twice monthly — perhaps overall, let alone for each individual instance, depending on your organization’s size, needs, and other considerations. Further, it should be considered what operations are typically executed, especially if they simple operations such as joining multiple PDFs, or extracting a page or two, which can be easily performed by many, using any of a multitude of software packages you can get without cost, as opposed to perhaps more technical tasks which may justify costly specialized software.

Creating PDFs from an established document

To begin with, most software which create documents will have an option in the File menu or elsewhere to Print, or Print to Document, or an Export function, which will offer PDF as a format:

PDF (creation) Options in the “Export as PDF” option in LibreOffice

At the risk of skipping ahead to the PDF splitting section below, note that it is a common option to be able to selectively output some, instead of all, pages to the resulting PDF, thereby avoiding the question of having to later split the PDF to get only the desired page(s).

Overview of PDF Software

Perhaps (or perhaps not) to the surprise of many, there are many software packages and suites which will:

Display PDF files
Combine, divide, and export PDF files, as well as reorder pages within a PDF;
Edit PDF files, such as the overall files and the file metadata, as well as the PDF file content
Import and display PDF files according to particular strengths (The Gimp, Inkscape, e-readers)

Displaying PDF files:

Here are some examples of software which will display PDF files directly:

Evince Document Viewer (Gnome Project)
Okular (KDE Project)
Firefox and Chromium (Web Browsers)
PDFSam (limited free version; there is also a commercial version with more capabilities); a version for Debian derived Linux systems is available on their website

Here is a very short list of software which will open and display PDF files and allow editing, each according to their strengths, but whose primary function is not PDF display:

LibreOffice (Office Suite)
Calligra (Office Suite)
The Gimp (Image Manipulation)
Inkscape (Vector Graphics Editor)

Evince Document Viewer

Chromium (web browser)

Okular

Software to Combine PDF files

A relatively common activity is to combine multiple PDF files into one file — such as, separately scanned pieces of paper, or PDF files produced separately, perhaps by different people.

Here are some examples of software which will combine PDF files:

PDF Mix Tool
PDF Arranger
PDF Mod
PDF Jumbler
PDFedit
PDFTricks
PDFSam
LibreOffice
Calligra Suite
The Gimp

Combining PDF files in PDFArranger

Software to Divide PDF Files / Extract Pages

Another relatively common activity is to divide a PDF File, or extract one or more pages from a PDF file.

Note that if you are the creator of the document, as shown earlier, the software you used to create the document likely allows for you to selectively export individual or multiple pages to PDF in addition to exporting the entire document.

Here are some examples of software which will divide PDF files / extract pages:

PDF Mix Tool
PDF Mod
PDF Jumbler
PDFedit
PDFTricks
PDFSam
LibreOffice — allows to print and / or export one or more pages
Calligra Suite — allows to print and / or export one or more pages
The Gimp — allows to print and / or export one or more pages

Splitting a PDF File with PDFMod

Removing pages from a PDF file using PDFMod

PDF Editing

Here are some examples of software which will edit PDF files to varying degrees:

LibreOffice permits the possibility of creating a hybrid PDF and .odt / .ods file (word processor or spreadsheet files), which will allow for the PDF to be more easily edited by any suite that is able to edit .odt and .ods files; create a document with LibreOffice, and in creating a PDF, choose Export — General — PDF Hybrid (incorporating .odt / .ods file)

Other software to edit existing PDF files:

LibreOffice Draw
The Gimp
Scribus
PDFedit (old, but good)
jPDF Tweak (old, but good)
PDF Mix Tool (Basic functions)
https://itsfoss.com/pdf-editors-linux/
https://alternativeto.net/software/pdf24-creator/?platform=linux
PDFFill (pdffill.com) (Windows)

In my personal experience, PDF editing — and ease of doing so — can vary wildly according to what one wishes to do, as well as wildly according to the nature of the source PDF. I have had excellent experiences editing a PDF created from a CAD software drawing (presumably created using commercial CAD software such as AutoCAD), and whose individual elements could be manipulated in LibreOffice Draw. I have also used LibreOffice Draw to insert text zones, arrows, and scanned signatures into PDFs. Conversely, documents composed primarily of scanned images — including text and forms — may require more image manipulation skills to edit, modify, and manipulate individual and specific elements of the document, depending on your objectives.

What you can do will also be dictated by which software package you choose and its strengths and weaknesses.

For instance, it should be noted that the phrase “Editing a PDF” can be a nebulous thing which can mean many and different things to many and different people. For instance, actually editing document text directly in the PDF may be what one understands and expects, while the strengths of a given piece of software may lay elsewhere.

LibreOffice has some PDF import functions, as well as imperfect document layout functions. Depending on the source PDF document, it can be quite effective at editing text directly.

Note from the closed-source world: I once had an excellent experience with a moderately-difficult-to-edit PDF using Microsoft Word, which included being able to edit the text — and presumably save in MS Word’s native file format.

Importing and editing a PDF in LibreOffice Draw (note the imperfect import):

In the case of my example PDF, LibreOffice Draw allows for some direct editing of the text (Notice the word “MODIFIÉ” with a brick-red text colour replacing some of the text):

Importing and editing a PDF in Scribus, a desktop publishing programme:

The Gimp can insert text zones into a PDF, and which text zones themselves may be edited within The Gimp; however, its strengths lie in dealing with a PDF as an image, and editing image characteristics, while editing the text as one might in a word processor might be more challenging.

Importing a PDF file into The Gimp, image manipulation software:

Adding a text zone to a PDF in The Gimp:

Note the insertion of a text zone under the first line, saying “TEST document”

Exporting Text, Cut & Paste, and .odt File Creating

Depending on the source PDF and its nature, “cut & paste” may work (as opposed to not working at all), and may even “work well”, although this may be wildly variable according to the source PDF document. However, even in the best case, this method will normally only copy the actual text, and some of the images, from your PDF document; it may not usually be particularly useful in actually replicating the PDF document formatting.

As for other document and content formats, such as drawings, pictures, and text rendered into images, other sections of this post should be consulted (ie. using LibreOffice Draw or The Gimp for drawings; optical character reading (OCR), including OCRFeeder, etc.)

In addition to the mention of LibreOffice above, OCRFeeder is software that acts as a front end to optical character recognition software, and is able to import PDF files, and then export in HTML, plain text, OpenDocument (.odt) format, and of course PDF. Again depending on the source file, results may be variable, although the results are usable.

OCRFeeder in action and ready to export a page of the example PDF to ODT format

… and here is an image of the exported .odt file (word processor file) of the page viewed and created in OCRFeeder, then opened in my word processor (LibreOffice):

Ironically, as this case shows, the changes (or lack of adequate recognition and / or translation of the original layout) can be as great or even more as can occur by simply sharing documents between not-fully-compatible-though-similar software suites. However, though far from perfect, it is arguably usable, depending, of course, on how much effort you are willing to devote to replicating the original document layout — and then making your desired changes, and finally creating a new PDF document.

Exporting to other file formats:

As has been (indirectly) demonstrated several times throughout this post, PDF files can be imported into software that isn’t specifically dedicated to PDFs, and then allow for the resulting imported file to be exported into other formats. For example, The Gimp was used to create most of the working images for this post: In the case where PDF files were to be displayed, the PDF files were imported into The Gimp, and then exported in jpeg or png formats. This type of conversion — from PDF to another given format — can often be done by other pieces of software (to varying degrees) according to their strengths or weaknesses.

Photo Editing with PDFs

The Gimp is fully functional image processing software, very similar to — but, unfortunately, not fully compatible with nor a perfect drop-in replacement of — Photoshop. Using The Gimp, you can import a PDF and edit the image(s) directly, or extract photos and other images through a variety of means, such as selecting the area of the photo, copying the selected area, and creating a new document from the clipboard.

Here is a The Gimp having imported a PDF of a photo of myself on a cruise:

PDF of a photo of the author imported into The Gimp

During the live presentation, I gave the hypothetical example — for the sake of levity — of a barber who particularly likes sideburns, and seeing mine in a PDF, decided to clip out one of my sideburns from the photo …

Selecting a region of the photo and creating a new document therefrom

… and then notice on how I was starting to go grey at the time :

The beginnings of some greying in my sideburns

It is taken as an understood that use of The Gimp to manipulate the photo can be continued at this point — such as how my sideburns might look after a colouring, or to compare side-by-side against other people’s sideburns — and then the result exported as a PDF.

PDFTricks allows for resizing of images in PDFs, principally compressing and reducing the file size to the order of “large”, “medium”, “small”, and “extra-small”, as well as image exporting to .jpg / .png / .txt formats, and file merging and splitting.

During the presentation, the PDF document above composed of the photo of myself on a trip was run through the software’s “extreme compression” option. The following is a clip from a screenshot from a file manager, showing the size difference between the the original file, and the newly created compressed file:

File size difference before and after processing file with PDFTricks

LibreOffice Draw allows for some image manipulation.

LibreOffice Draw being used to manipulate an embedded image

In this particular situation, the night sky drawing in the karaoke page of the example PDF I created was selected, and the various options directly available were shown. However, as mentioned earlier, I have imported PDF documents of building plans and modified them to include notes showing were works were performed, or to add signatures to documents.

PDF Forms

PDF Form Creation

LibreOffice Writer and Calligra Suite are fully-featured for the creation of forms. Unfortunately, I am not particularly adept at creating forms.

Filling PDF Forms

Evince — if the PDF form was designed to be interactively filled
Okular — if the PDF form was designed to be interactively filled
The Gimp — allows for text areas to be inserted, as well as photos, drawings, and the like
LibreOffice Draw — allows for text areas to be inserted, as well as photos, drawings, and the like

Here is an example form found at https://www.aloaha.com/sample-fillable-pdf-forms/ — a sample tax form which I began filling out for Mickey and Minnie Mouse, using Evince:

Fillable form being filled with the names of Mickey and Minnie Mouse

Final Choices:

Viewing / displaying PDF files : User’s choice (usually a system’s default PDF viewer is adequate, or a web browser)
Combining and splitting PDF files : PDFMixTool
Editing PDF files : User’s choice (depends on objectives and source file; The Gimp and LibreOffice Draw are good contenders)
Adjusting PDF file size : PDFTricks
Form creation : User’s choice
Form filling : User’s choice (usually a system’s default PDF viewer is adequate, or a web browser)
Exporting PDF to other formats : OCRFeeder (for .odt); LibreOffice Draw (Photos and images); The Gimp (photos and images)

Note on Linux availability of the above software:

Here are some screen shots from my system’s installed repositories (Fedora Stable; Fedora Updates; rpmfusion.org — free and non-free)

PDF software easily accessible from my computer’s software repositories (“App Stores”):

Gnome Software list of available PDF software from various software repositories on Fedora Linux

As this list suggests, there is lot of software available which have varying PDF abilities, ranging from being dedicated PDF software of various kinds, to other pieces of software with other principal functions but with PDF functions ranging to simple importing from and exporting to the format, to being useful within the limits of the software’s main functions to manipulate PDF files in some way(s).

Summary:

This presentation’s goals are to highlight:

how PDF files are well supported most of the time on most systems, while the various pieces of software, between two versions, typically a well-known closed source project and an open-source counterpart, for document production, are not as compatible with each other as we may want;
free software while avoiding the security risks inherent to using unknown and potentially dangerous websites, as well as software which is easily available for routine tasks as well as to reduce costs;
the possibility of editing PDF files with various pieces of free software which are easily available in most Linux distributions’ repositories — as well as often easily available for other platforms — albeit occasionally with variable success.

Questions taken during the presentation:

A question asked midway through the presentation expressed a certain surprise that The Gimp can be used to edit PDFs. As mentioned earlier, The Gimp is able to import PDF files, and perform various functions on the file according to its strengths (image manipulation).

A participant asked at the end during a question period about a recommendation for software to affix signatures to documents. I replied that I was not aware of any open source official signing software with digital traceability, simply because that I had not done any research on that subject; however, an image of a scanned signature can usually be inserted in a document using The Gimp or LibreOffice Draw, or as a document is being created in a word processor.

A final comment recommended the use of LibreOffice Draw, based on the commentor’s frequent use of it to perform a number of the functions listed here, to which I’d commented that I had asked my employer’s IT department to install LibreOffice on my work-issued Windows-based laptop computer in order to be able to perform some drawing-modification functions as part of my employment.

Enjoy sharing and editing PDF files!

UPDATE 20220407:

Signing PDFs can be performed with jPDF Tweak.

JPDF Tweak can also encrypt and add passwords to a PDF.

April 6, 2009June 22, 2020

Oooooops, I was wrong … (so what else is new?)

In a previous post, “I may just have that reason to get rid of Ubuntu” I stated that the thing that killed Ubuntu for me was the difference in how OO.o on Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 deal with the “notes” function in a document. The versions of OO.o in question were — according to distrowatch.com — 2.4.0 for Ubuntu 8.04 and 2.4.0 for Fedora 9. As of today’s date my F9 notebook has updated itself to 2.4.2, so to be fair I imagine that in the past year Hardy Heron has had some updates as well.

Today I stumble across this little gem from the OpenOffice.org website:

Improved Notes Feature in Writer

“In the past; notes in OpenOffice.org were just displayed as small yellow rectangles within the text. This was not very intuitive and user friendly. With version 3.0, OpenOffice.org got an advanced notes features which displays notes on the side of the document. This makes notes a lot easier to read. In addition, notes from different users are displayed in different colours together with the editing date and time.”

Ooops.

I went off on a holy rant, wondering why the heck Ubuntu has changed a few things more that it arguably needed to, when in fact … well, it apparently hadn’t: The annoying yellow dot was a function of OO.o to begin with. At that time. If anyone was changing things, it was Fedora backporting this function some time last fall, assuming that it wasn’t OO.o doing it, or adding a preview into the version that Fedora grabbed and included in F9 — in keeping with Fedora’s usual policy of not using custom patches not necessary to Fedora integration or backporting updates, instead opting for rapid changes, new releases, and submitting bug and improvement patches upstream instead.

Which is perhaps not saying much since at release time, both distros were using 2.4.0; rather, it only raises the question of why things are different between two nominally identical pieces of software, and perhaps lifts blame away from Ubuntu.

Oh well, I still don’t like Ubuntu. 🙂

In the meantime … I wonder how this is explained given that both distros apparently had the same version of OO.o at release time. I wonder if the feature was backported in Fedora. Or if it was backported by OO.o and Fedora simply passed on the change. Or … ?

And in the meantime as well, I wonder about the notes function in previous versions of the 2.x series of OO.o acting in “the new way” at least back to 2006 — again in the same post, second to last paragraph:

“The appearance of the notes in the margin is not a recent occurrence in OO.o, at least in the 2.0 series: back in August 2006 under CentOS 4.4” OK, this is still the Red Hat family” I received a document with the notes visible in the margin (being a work contract I declined the document and asked that they resend the proper version, please.) I was using the standard OO.o 2.whatever downloaded and installed directly from openoffice.org (since the CentOS 4 series originally came wih OO.o 1.5.something series; I’d been using the OO.o 2.0 series for close to a year at that point under Windows before I’d made the switch to linux.)”

February 5, 2009April 27, 2020

Hmmm … OO.o differences, Fedora, and Ubuntu

In my post I may just have that reason to get rid of Ubuntu I whined about minor differences between “stock” OpenOffice.org appearances and functions and those I used straight off the OO.o website as well as what ships with Fedora.

This blog (here’s my archive) explains a bit why: It says “Many Linux distributions ship ooo-build. … Fedora ships a modified OpenOffice.org, but Fedora does not use ooo-build.” Which means that in keeping with Fedora’s usual policy, it ships upstream versions of software with only reasonably required modifications to make it work under Fedora. When I was using CentOS, I was using the vanilla version directly from OO.o.

That explains a few things. It doesn’t necessarily justify my whining — nor all the changes Ubuntu or other distros (or even Fedora) make, but … Why mess with a good thing? 🙂

March 20, 2007January 24, 2025

A LUzer abandons Windows and goes for Linux

I “got” the facts. And I acted on them. MS played their hand; it trumped mine. And I won.

I would call myself a LUzer. I don’t really understand what is going under the hood. On the other hand, I have been characterized as a 7 out of 10 when it comes to knowing about computers and being competent, although I think the person was being at least a bit generous. Go figure. Maybe the fact that by 1994 I had completely stopped helping people with their computers, and had been doing next to no helping since I’d screwed up a friend’s computer in 1990 (although it was quite easily salvageable by somebody who *did* know what they were doing around computers), says something about how smart I might actually be with a computer by virtue of knowing my limitations. Ah, bull.

My first intro to Linux was in 1996 when a friend had installed it on his new PI-90. I have a memory of XP style windows on top of a black command line screen.

In 1999 my 486 SX-33 running Win 3.1 — the original legal install from when I’d bought the machine five years before — was finally grinding to a halt after five years of faithful service. This was just before software that would clean up your system existed or just on the cusp of their mainstream availability. I knew that putting Linux on it would be a good idea, clean up the system, and give it a new life for a while longer. I found a few small distros but couldn’t load them due to peculiarities about Toshiba disk drives. A few aborted attempts to get friends to help didn’t get anywhere. Finally my brother managed to force some version of linux onto a 200meg HD, probably a Red Hat distro of the day, but it was only command line. It didn’t help much. I quickly abandonned the system and relegated it to a closet until selling it about a year and a half later.

In 2000 I bought a new desktop and had Win98 installed with a Red Hat 6.0 dual boot. The choice was easy, I supposedly had a decent system and my brother was running a dot.com hosting company on it. After a few weeks I finally got fed up with it; it wasn’t meeting my needs even though I wanted to get rid of MS. I think that lack of user friendliness, having lost half of my 14 gig HD, apparent lack of software availability, and lack of ease of installation for a windows-type was what did it in. The Windows side was grinding to a halt and I finally managed to, ahem, upgrade to Windows 2000 in late 2001, wiping out the dual boot in the process. It was a bit slower than Windows 98 but as promised it was stable and did not get progressively slower with time. Not much anyway.

My net activities since 1999 have not much changed, I surf the same few websites daily, email, etc. In 1999 my habits were also very similar to what I was doing in 1995-1997 on the net, except more web surfing and virtually no newsgroups. I had thrown in a bit of midi fascination in 2003, but in short order my machine couldn’t even play them. Video became quickly out of the question (performance was barely and really not acceptable at first, and was hopeless in short order). I know that software that worked fine on the computer out of the box in 2000 would never again work with any semblance of actually operating, let alone acceptably.

Meantime in late 2004, a friend’s hubby told me to try out Firefox. It took me a few weeks to get around to trying it, but once I had there was no turning back to Internet Explorer. At this point the recommendations to get away to anything from IE6 were flying left and right from all sorts of reputable sources. Sometime later I, ahem, “upgraded” again to Windows XP.

Then in the spring of 2005, I had had some problems one evening with a critical project for school. Working full time and taking night courses was tough enough, but my (admittely unofficial) copy of MS Office was suddenly grinding to a literal halt for several minutes on my new to me PIII 450 laptop while just trying to open up a Save dialog was getting to be over the top stressful. OpenOffice.org to the rescue, and within a few days it was on my Celeron 533 desktop as well, used full time on both machines, and a few weeks later I got around to uninstalling MS Office to save disk space. What a relief to have done that, even without the space savings.

Interestingly, I’ve mostly used software and clients that most people were not using. Admittedly, despite this I was still experiencing problems, which I expect were more or less typical of problems experienced by others, yet I think I escaped many more other problems. I understand that there were all sorts of problems related to the use of MS Outlook, which I had never used since being online starting in mid 1994 and only started using it in mid 2005 at work. Netscape, then Firefox instead of Internet Explorer most of the time (although there was a while that I did use IE.) Eudora instead of MS Outlook. I liked newsgroups instead of the web for many years. Finally I was using OpenOffice.org. All this seems like it was a good practice. Getting “wonderful”, read rude and crude, feedback from normally quiet, peaceful gentlepeople regarding spams on lists merely confirmed that not using the same clients that everyone else was using was a good thing. Admittedly, I was using MS Windows like the crowd. Norton, MS Office (although no more at this point), etc., too.

Then in May 2006 when the Windows Genuine Advantage update came about, and it was not possible to get rid of it from my systems despite several, uhm, attempts. WGA was the incentive I needed to make the move. Definitively, wholly, and permanently. Well, ok, at work they still are entrenched with Windows and won’t budge. At least the IT guys humour me.

I realized at this point I was generally doing something else very interesting, besides mostly using clients different from the crowd: What made my computer do the things I wanted to do — word processing, spreadsheets, web surfing, a few other small projects, were increasingly Open Source. Eudora was not what most people were using. Virtually all — in fact, I can’t think of much to cite an exception, although there were one or two — of the little projects I was doing was done using free software off the Internet. Essentially, virtually all of what I was doing was essentially independent of what — or should I say “Who” — was under the hood beyond the specific technical requirements involved in choosing which download button to choose. And much of it was not what most people are using. What was underneath didn’t much matter, if at all. Surely under Linux, once it tickles my fancy to do those little one or two time jobs again, there would be at least one linux program on the net that works, for the hundreds or perhaps thousands of mostly either for-a-fee or crippleware or really bad implementation of the job under Windows that exist with perhaps one or two good freeware implementations.

At the same time, I was sick and tired of using pirated software, a slow system, and hearing all the stories from my brother talking about the horror stories from his MS-using clients and how wonderful Linux is. I was and am as cheap to buy a new computer as I was in purchasing software, and was getting fed up with Windows in general anyway. And was getting fascinated by my brother using obsolete computers to do what he needed under Linux; admittedly, not always as fast as everyone else was, but doing it nonetheless. I was even contributing to the cause by being on the lookout all the time for old computers and spare parts being tossed. At the same time my Celeron 533 was grinding to a halt under the massive weight of Windows XP, Norton Antivirus and Firewall, cookies, spyware (despite doing regular cleans and surprisingly not really having much), you name it. Despite all you hear about spyware, malware, trojan horses, virii, etc., the last time I had a good old fashioned computer virus was in 1990. And I had relatively few bits of spyware. No Trojan Horses or malware to my confidant knowledge. Imagine what those less savvy than I (remember I sincerely consider myself a LUzer) — and if anything you hear about the problems people are suffering is to be believed, apparently the majority of people were having way more difficulties than I, and more recently than 1990 — must be going through. It makes me wonder why any linux desktop or the collective of such hasn’t made any real inroads against MS. Perhaps Elmer has been out hunting a lot of Wabbits.

I told my brother that I was sure this time. I wanted to go to Linux. And all the way. My computers were to be MS free zones. He kept on trying to convince me to do a dual boot. Nope, that ultimately was my doing in the last time, it was too easy to go back when things were too complicated for my laziness, but I was serious and understood the value (and consequences) of going cold-turkey.

He knew that I was serious but suspected that perhaps I still hadn’t grasped what I was asking for. He later said that he was behaving much like the rest of the linux community, which he characterized as being like some religions that don’t try to recruit and actually shun converts; they just want to grow by new members from birth, who likely and/or hopefully are going to be more committed. I don’t know if this is true; I have heard lots of stories to the contrary about how helpful people are toward linux newbies. I think that despite his enthusiasm in the idea of making a convert, he was really groaning, realizing that he’d have to do all the work while I enjoyed the fruits of his labour. So one fateful day we were discussing the subject for the umpteenth time and I responded to some question no doubt along the lines of “yeah, but why?” with the following: “I want something to believe in.” He was intrigued. Very intrigued.

Now I suspect — I know — that I wasn’t so much looking to believe in Linux, although I somewhat was, as I was just so sick and tired of Windows, a virtually useless computer, the MS culture, and was more wrestling with moral issues of having illegal software on my computer, at least given a really convenient reason to lean on this crutch. On this last point, MS proved to me beyond any doubt that they knew, or at least could know if they really wanted to, that I had a pirated install, even though they likely weren’t going to physically come after me, at least in the short term. The scare was enough to push me over the edge; I *knew* that a consequence of WGA was that if it ain’t Ã¼ber-critical, I wouldn’t be getting the update and an already suffering system wouldn’t survive the lack of updates over time. And in a sense, the FUD worked. Just as well, it was all linux needed to win me over. Except that MS only won the moral battle; they didn’t get my “Oh please, MS, please please please forgive me and accept my money for a legit copy of your … software I don’t like … that requires third party applications to make my computer safe while further slowing it down to uselessness”

In any case I knew that all but one of the things I wanted to do in Windows could be done just as well under Linux, sometimes better, and other opportunities lay open. Fortunately a web application that is more convenient than the original Windows application I was depending on came around within a couple of months after the switch, and no tie to the past was left.

First install at the end of June 2006 was Fedora Core 5. I think my Celeron didn’t take and kept on hanging during the install, so it was donated to my brother’s cause and he pulled out a PIII 550 that finally had hardware to match or so I’m told. Alledgedly it was an online casino server in an earlier life about five or six years ago. Now I’m told the video memory isn’t great for videos, but hey everything else is great. And the laptop is good for videos.

Don’t get me going on this one (but here I go anyway), suffice it to say that my limited experience with most computers is that you’ve got a processor that is this class, but the bus speed and/or the amount of memory and/or the HD speed and/or the HD size and/or the HD transfer rate and/or the mother board speed and/or … you get the picture, are underpowered usually due to mismatching and alledged sales responses to consumer demand for an inexpensive machine. Sure I’m as cheap as the next guy and am usually interested in saving a few dollars. But this translates into underpowered or needlessly oversupported or otherwise inappropriately built machines. Why put a porsche engine in a Jalopy? Or a Mini engine in the tractor for an 18 wheeler? Or four season tires on a Formula One race car in the middle of a Montreal snow storm? Or a Ferrari transmission in a Yugo? I probably would have paid an extra hundred or two back when I bought my original machine were I to have been assured not that it was probably right for me, but that it truly was a good machine (albeit not top of the line) and the best part is that all the components are appropriate to each other. I paid an extra couple of hundred for a 17″ screen instead of the standard 15″ and have been pleased with the decision since day one.

Back to FC5. Originally I was going to get CentOS 4.4, but then I was told that things were going to be bleeding edge with FC5, and I appropriately mused that I no doubt would end up bleeding around the edges. 🙂 Big mistake. Sorry Red Hat, I may be a fan (mostly since my sysadmin is big time into RH) but this was a bad choice. Dependency hell was my experience. Broken updates. Losing my net connection and having to reset things back to the first kernel that worked just to get the modem back up and running. I’d be afraid to do yum updates just because I knew that there would be 15 to 20 or more per day, not to mention a few more in a couple of hours before I went to bed. And some would break, for the umpteenth time, my net connection. Later I find out that on FC5 the FC people had gone haywire and out of control with development, and didn’t do enough QC on things like dependencies or this or that, and further that my brother thinks he mistakenly installed the heavily-bleeding-edge -devel fork instead of the -stable fork.

About 6-8 weeks later, the aforementionned PIII 450 laptop was formatted with CentOS 4.4. Best thing to ever happen. Things actually worked on the machine and I could do things that I either couldn’t do with FC5 or didn’t dare for fear of the dreaded multiple-times-daily updates breaking things. Amongst other things, I could watch movies again on the laptop. Obviously, I’m part of the target audience for the CentOS desktop: Rock solid with rock solid stability and slow-moving advances without the support because I can get it elsewhere reigns supreme for me. And the price tag suited me. OK, that’s the same target audience as the RHEL people, except for the deep pockets and need for support. Credit where it’s due: if you didn’t know already, CentOS is a recompile of the RHEL sources, which also have strong roots in … Fedora Core. 🙂

Several weeks after that, bye-bye FC5 on the PIII 550 desktop, WELCOME CentOS 4.4. Ahhhhh … The desktop is finally useable again. Not that it was outright unuseable under FC5, I just didn’t need the stress of wondering how many updates I’d have this afternoon or whether my modem would “disappear” again. Those are exactly the kinds of things from which I was trying to get away from by getting rid of Windows, even if those particular issues were not specifically in my Windows experience. At the same time the modem was moved away from my mom’s Windows machine and hooked up to my PIII 550. Then a funny thing happened.

At this point there were a few months’ worth of delay after delay coming from my brother regarding updating configurations and dealing with little fixes or upgrades on my machines which were best done by him having physical access to the machine. Coincidental to the CentOS 4.4 UPGRADE (ie, going to software, settings, libraries and so on that are a year or two behind what’s current in FC wasn’t a downgrade, regardless of how the technology compares), my mom’s machine started freezing up. My brother and I were convinced that it had nothing to do with literally only changing the position within the network of the modem and the upgrade from FC5 to CentOS 4.4 on the new modem server. Months, three Windows rebuilds, and a hardware change (her old Celeron 333, which put aside the freezing could play video while mine couldn’t under Windows was switched in favour of said old Celeron 533) later with no solution in sight, we were finally looking at my machine since my brother was feeling a bit sorry for me having mostly ignored my computers over that time in favour of my mom’s computer, which I admittedly agreed was a priority as long as I lived in her house. And he stumbled upon something interesting by pure chance: A network setting in *my* box was incorrect and was essentially souring her network connection and hence by extention the Windows box too. Ahhh, two birds, one stone. My help was back. 🙂

At the same time as the CentOS upgrade on the PIII 550, a few minor problems were still in place, and some solved by remote: I had been using OpenOffice.org 2.0 under Windows for months since it had come out in late 2005, and Centos 4.4, which I installed about 9 months later in June 2006, comes with OO.o 1.1.2. This was one of the first things to be installed/updated on both machines. Another thing came up with MPlayer: It didn’t much do what I wanted — or much of anything, for that matter — and it took a few months of pleading with my brother to finally solve the issues that completely crippled it when we tried to update it. (I know, here’s an example of where that “We don’t want any converts” argument comes into play. 🙂 ) Finally, Firefox 2.0 was out and it would have been nice to update just to see what it’s all about. A difficult job on both, but done on the laptop during one of a few trips to my brother’s bench for the update/fix/whatever du mois. 1.5 is still on the desktop and performs just as well as 2.0.

The (up-til now not mentionned) CD burner I’d had on my old machine that disappeared in the initial reformat months before finally got repatriated from my brother’s nebulous black hole of a junk pile and things were getting better. Now I’m getting somewhere. Stuff I want on CD can now be burned and cottage getaways are more pleasant again as a result.

Finally about after seven months of being able to mostly happily use both computers for what I want — most certainly at least on one computer or the other — the laptop is almost perfect, and now even has a wireless card that became obsolete for my brother when the screen on his old laptop finally died.

In the meantime, an FTP server has been set up on my PIII 550 desktop, and I figured out how to install GUI ftp client (this is a big step for me) on my laptop all on my own. Finally! I now have decent access to my desktop from my laptop to transfer files back and forth (my brother thought it best to make the laptop invisible to all networks, including my home network, in order to protect it from hostiles, making Windows style drag&drop over network drives impossible. Probably a good policy for when I’m on the move.) And the way that access works actually makes sense. Remember, I still — and *like* to — use my computers much the same way I did in 1994-1997, including my net experience, so ftp’ing in to transfer files on and off either system actually makes as much sense if not more to me than a Windows style drag&drop over network drives. There is also a commercial quality web server on my PIII 550 that currently is lying dormant until my brother and I get some face time in front of the computer so that he can show me how to use it.

Then last week I managed to install Pan, a GUI newsreader client. (Might Seamonkey have one of those? Oh yeah, that would be following the crowd. So be it, I’m using Evolution in Gnome. 🙂 ) I seem to be reverting to that beloved 1994-1997 period again. 🙂

Do you think I’m going to update to CentOS 5.0 in a few weeks? Do you think that you’re really going to win the big prize in the lottery this week? Of course not. My machines are stable despite the little things I always want them to do and the things that crop up as a result of changes that are made. Most importantly, they work, and they’re not interminably slow for a comparable and even in some cases superior setup under Windows. And they will be supported and secure for years to come, although my brother will likely convince me to upgrade in a year or two, assuming that by then I haven’t added brand new (at least to me) silicone to my space-deprived abode, which obviously would have the latest CentOS release installed. As they stand, the machines with CentOS 4.4 (mostly) do what I want. What doesn’t yet has nothing to do with the differences between 4.4, 5.0, virtual machines, updated video libraries, or whatever else will be in there.

Now all I need is to find a few hot spots. And I don’t need to borrow a transmitter anymore from the front desk when I check into motels during business trips. I wonder if those motels that charge for a network password are platform independent, or assume that you’re a Windows user and hence don’t know how to challenge a linux machine for a password? (It seems that at at least one motel where they provided free passwords and free wireless, this appeard to be the case. Either that or their password login system was optional.)

Eight months in, I’m finally figuring out, very small step by very small step, how to tap into the power of my computers. Even if you could say that I’ve merely traded one set of LUzer troubles for another.

And I couldn’t be happier about it.

(begin humming grunge style) ‘cos I’m a LUzer bay-bai, so why don’t you flame me?

PS.

My 80gig drive is still next to useless since it’s still NTFS without writing priveledges. In line with my initial zealotry, I have to get around to backing up what needs to be backed up and either get my brother to reformat under a native linux format or figure it out myself.