by neuromancer - Published: September 10th, 2010

I’ve missed this feature for more than two years
Ubuntu installer can recognize the /home directory when installing, preserving it on successive reinstall.
So user doesn’t need to create separate partition and furthermore doesn’t need to know anything related with disk and partition, just insert the Ubuntu Cd on your pc and drink a cup of tea.

This a real useful functionality (personal data always preserved) and more simple installing process.
Ubuntu rock!

Great tips Jorge!

Comments: No Comment - Category: free software, ubuntu
by neuromancer - Published: January 21st, 2010
Comments: No Comment - Category: ubuntu
by neuromancer - Published: October 26th, 2009

ocr_1Just a quick post about tesseract, a quite good solution for OCR under GNU/Linux (specifically Ubuntu Karmic Koala).
First install it trough apt-get
sudo apt-get tesseract-ocr
Install also your preferred language (in my case eng -> tesseract-ocr-eng and ita -> tesseract-ocr-ita).

Ok, we are ready to do some text recognition…
But, under Karmic Koala, there is a problem with tif image as reported by myself here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tesseract/+bug/461177
The problem is due to a transparent alpha layer that some tif images have (investigation needed here…*), so before do text recognition is necessary to eliminate it, elsewhere tesseract will generate an empty file…
Just install imagemagick and from a shell do this steps:
convert inputimage.tif inputimage_tmp.pbm
convert inputimage_tmp.pbm inputimage_ok.tif

Original solution founded here.

Now we are finally ready to launch tesseract on our tif image.
Just do
tesseract inputimage_ok.tif outputfile
and tesseract will generate outputfile.txt with recognized text.

ps. The packaged version under karmic is 2.03 and not the last one, 2.04, that, as advised on this page, fixed it. So if you prefer, remove old version and install the new version from source.

* Solved. In Gimp is possible to remove the alpha layer. Just go to
Layer (Livello) -> Transparency (Trasparenza) -> Remove alpha layer (Rimuovi canale alpha)

Comments: No Comment - Category: gnu/linux, software, ubuntu
by neuromancer - Published: October 9th, 2009

A few day ago I began to use Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 beta on my laptop.
It’s look very fine and also work great but yesterday I’ve found a big problem for me and all developer that use Eclipse as preferred IDE.

The problem is that Eclipse Galileo doesn’t work right with the new version of gtk (gtk+ 2.18), and therefore all the Eclipse GUI is unusable.
In particular I’ve noted that click of mouse are not intercepted correctly and also some interface redraw (for example if I change perspective or move some bar) doesn’t work.

Now, this morning I’ve found the bug and also a workaround for the moment.
Just open a terminal, then give this command export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true and finally launch eclipse from the same terminal.

Open Source community it’s amazing!

Update
Now eclipse packaged in Ubuntu official repository work without above trick. Simply install eclipse 3.5.1-0ubuntu7 (or later) from the Ubuntu archive.
Eclipse version in the official eclipse site doesn’t work right yet. (See #28 in this bug for a complete explanation of this Eclipse bug)

Comments: No Comment - Category: open source, programming, ubuntu