There are at least three ways to do this in Ubuntu. You will need the packages ghostscript (for all methods, but installed by default) and pdftk (for method 2), and optionally a Java Runtime Environment (for method 3).

Method 1: ps2pdf

The ps2pdf script that comes with Ghostscript is meant …

The other day I found out I had misspelled a word in a whole batch of automatically generated PDF files. Regenerating all of them would be a lot of work, as the PDF files were plots created using perl/PDL, gnuplot and epstopdf (available in texlive-extra-utils), and the input data …

Older versions of Ubuntu (before 8.04) used to have a built-in font-manager that could be reached by browsing font:/// in the file-manager. However, when Gnome upgraded to their new gvfs in 2008, their font manager and viewer both stopped working. In current Ubuntu-versions, at least the built-in font viewer …

Recently I tried to open several old MS Word files created on a Macintosh in OpenOffice.org on my Ubuntu machine. The text part of the documents got converted just fine by OpenOffice.org Writer, but the images became rather messed up. Anything that had been imported as a bitmap …

UPDATE (2010-08-25): This article describes how to configure Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) for stable 3D-acceleration and desktop-effects with ATI R300 series (Radeon Mobility 9600 and similar) GPUs. On recent Ubuntu versions (such as 10.04 LTS) this should work out of the box, and making modifications to xorg …

In Linux-land there are two major package management systems, APT/dpkg and YUM/RPM. My favourite of the two is definitely APT, which is mostly used by Debian and derivatives such as Ubuntu. Yum is used by Red Hat and derivatives such as CentOS, Fedora and SME, and works just …