Linux Notes
The following notes are things I have come across whilst using Linux on a day to day basis. I suspect other people will have the same issues and that they will find my solutions via Google.
Installing firmware on Fedora Core 3
Firmware is the software used on hardware components. Often you will need to get some firmware files so that the Linux kernel can figure out the capabilities of a piece of hardware. This is especially true for USB devices such as TV cards. Different distro have different location for hot pluggable firmware. This is a problem as many howto tutorials don't mention different requirements for different distros. Firmware files on FC3 must be placed in the following directory.
/lib/firmware
Converting a PDF to a Powerpoint Presentation
A PDF reader is not always available at a conference presentation, so it makes sense to have a powerpoint version of PDF based slides just in case. The following commands create image versions of each slide in a presentation, which can then be inserted into a powerpoint presentation. The qulaity is a little less sharp than the originals but good enough for presentation.
convert slides.pdf image_%04d.gif #convert the pdf to gifs
#you will probably want to rotate the outputted images
for i in image_*.gif; do
convert -rotate 90 "$i" "rotated$i"
done