1. Resizing images

Unless you are doing some sort of cropping there is no reason to load up Photoshop or the Gimp. A simple command will usually suffice for almost all your image resizing needs.

convert -resize 300 image.jpg image-small.jpg

If you finding yourself doing lots of image resizing during the day, this command could potentially save you a LOT of time. You can even do mass image resizing.

2. Adding a Drop Shadow to an Image

I found myself spending a ton of time adding drop shadows to images. Using a simple command I was able to create drop shadows in seconds.

convert screenshot.jpg \( +clone -background black -shadow 60×5+0+5 \) +swap -background white -layers merge +repage shadow.jpg

Note: You must have Imagemagick installed for this command to work. Debian/Ubuntu users can use apt-get install imagemagick.

Obviously, I don’t expect you to memorize this command. To shorten it use an alias.

3. Splice Together an MP3

If you want simple MP3 splicing this command has your back:

cat 1.mp3 2.mp3 > combined.mp3

4. Clone a Hard Drive

DD is one the most simplistic and powerful image applications out there.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

5. Burn an ISO to a CD

Why open up K3B or some other program just to burn an ISO? Map this command to an alias and get burning.

cdrecord -v speed=8 dev=0,0,0 name_of_iso_file.iso

Note: You need to get the info for the ‘dev=’ part by running ‘cdrecord -scanbus’

6. Video Conversions

Let’s say you want to convert an AVI to an Mpeg file:

ffmpeg -i video_origine.avi video_finale.mpg

Or convert an Mpeg to AVI:

ffmpeg -i video_origine.mpg video_finale.avi

There are all sorts of things you can do with ffmpeg.

7. Replace Words in a Text File

No need to open up a GUI text editor when you have sed.

This command from Eric’s Wendelin’s blog will replace all instances of a color in CSS with another one.

sed ’s/#FF0000/#0000FF/g’ main.css

Portable Ubuntu for Windows is a Ubuntu system running as a Windows application.

This system is built with the Colinux Kernel, Xming X server and Pulseaudio server for Windows.

Portable Ubuntu for Windows is a useful tool when you need to move yourself to other machine that have Windows as operating system.

Install Portable Ubuntu in windows PC

First you need to download latest version from here after downloading you can see the following details

File name:- Portable_Ubuntu.exe

File Size :- 438 MB (At the time of writing)

Project home page :-  http://portableubuntu.sourceforge.net

After completing your download double-click to unpack it to a folder. Head to the folder where you extracted your Portable Ubuntu, and double click “run_portable_ubuntu” to launch Portable Ubuntu.

If you are like me, someone who is very anxious to try out the latest alpha/beta releases out there, you will be glad to know that upgrading from your current Ubuntu install to the latest Alpha release is just a command away:

sudo update-manager –d

But before you jump up and start upgrading your stable Ubuntu desktop, where you do most of your important stuff, to a buggy alpha release you should know that this upgrade will definitely break some stuff on an otherwise perfect desktop you had before the upgrade. There is a reason why they are labeled “alpha” releases. In my case my audio stopped working. You could always download the ISO and install it as a virtual machine with VirtualBox, but you probably won’t appreciate the beauty of notify-osd under a VM, which depends on Compiz for sleek effects.

I have dummy old Pentium 4 for my experiments with alpha releases.

UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety
of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to
burn a CD. You can either let it download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux .iso file if you’ve already downloaded one or your preferred distribution isn’t on the list.

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