This article was originally written in 2011, and was slightly updated in 2014.

Filesystem types and (lack of) compatibility

Despite the fact that we’re no longer living in the 1980s, filesystem-compatibility between operating systems seems to remain an issue in computer-land. The filesystem basically defines the way in which files are organised on a disk. In the 1980s, the popularity of MS-DOS led to widespread adoption of the FAT filesystem, which was also used in earlier Windows versions (½/3/95/98/ME). As NT-based Windows versions (NT/2000/XP/Vista/7) started becoming the mainstream consumer-versions, more and more computers started using Microsoft’s proprietary NTFS.

Nowadays, most external USB harddisks are sold pre-formatted with an NTFS-filesystem, while camera flash-cards and USB thumb-drives tend to still use a FAT32 filesystem. NTFS …

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 to convert PostScript to PDF, but it will happily take PDF-files as input. Just try: ps2pdf input.pdf output.pdf

You can add GhostScript options to control the PDF-output. To get smaller files you can try adding one of the preset-options: -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook or -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen

For more advanced settings: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Ps2pdf.htm

Note that the screen preset converts all images to sRGB and converts to PDF 1.3 which does not support all types of …

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 (gnome-font-viewer) does work again. However the lack of a Gnome font-manager still leaves Ubuntu without proper font management out of the box, which is kind of annoying. Luckily in recent Ubuntu versions you can install the fontmatrix package, which gives you the excellent Fontmatrix font manager.

But even without Fontmatrix, it’s really not that hard to install fonts in Ubuntu. All the hard work is handled behind the scenes by Defoma, the somewhat invisible Debian Font Manager.

Of course Ubuntu comes with …