Luke's Ubuntu and Linux Hacks

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) Background Rather than upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 after many years of doing nothing but upgrades, I decided that a new, or fresh, full install might be a good idea. It was, overall, with very few glitches. One of those glitches was installing one of my favorite (and crucial to my work) applications: Calibre. What I Did I boogied over to the Calibre website and copied the code for the binary install, same as I had done for several years to both install Calibre originally, then to do version upgrades. What Happened When I opened a Terminal and pasted in the Install code, I got this result: You are missing the syst...

Be sure to check out our related post, "Convert PDF-image Files to Text." Click the "convert" label on this post . Undoubtedly, the Pay to Play programs often are the quickest, easiest and most efficient way to convert pdf files to text files such as MS Word or LibreOffice Writer. But we're not playing in a Windows or Mac environment, and we don't like to pay for stuff. So here are a few other ways to convert pdf files without paying for a program and without resorting to using Wine, dual-booting or any of that other Windows-centric stuff we detest. Converting an OCR or "Readable" pdf File to Text That means that the pdf file is not an image file. How can you tell if a pdf file is a pdf-text or a pdf-image file? Simple. If you can use your cursor to highlight words or sentences in the pdf file--especially if you can invoke the Copy-Paste function--it is most likely a pdf-text file. If not, it is probably a pdf-image file. PDF-Text Files Once I have...