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How to correct “Partition does not start on physical sector boundary” on Linux

Jun 142013

I’m in the process of re-installing ArchLinux on my new Dell Latitude 6530, this is because at the end of the first installation I noticed that while running fdisk -l I received a message like this one (that’s not my original disk, but the message was the same):

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63    39070079    19535008+  83  Linux
<strong>Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.
</strong>/dev/sda2        39070080    46877669     3903795   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3   *    46877670   144536804    48829567+  86  NTFS volume set
<strong>Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
</strong>/dev/sda4       144536805  1250263727   552863461+  86  NTFS volume set
<strong>Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.</strong>

I “shrinked” the original Windows 7 to 40 GB with Gparted live and created the partitions during the installation of ArchLinux with cfdisk so what’s wrong with these operations ?

Libre Office Version 4 – Tantalizingly Close

Articles, Opinion, Reviews 12 Responses »

Jun 132013

Article from Tcat Houser editor-in-chief of TRCBNews.com that recently ignited some fire with 2 articles:
OpenOffice versus LibreOffice versus The World and The Biggest Failure in Open Source Is…
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Some of the Linux faithful will look at this and say: “There he goes again, bashing open-source. He’s just a Microsoft shill.” They will use the fact I am an MCSE as ‘proof’ of their opinion.

Version 4.0 of LOO still suffers from the issue of cross file compatibility to Microsoft Office. However, the good news is the pain is less than ever before and we now get the ability to open Visio and Publisher files! Personally, I have not used either of these Microsoft programs in years so I cannot attest to how well they are handled.

Beyond my own daily use of LOO I have read in depth every review I could find on the Internet. My honest summary is they are far more negative than my feelings. Yes I must agree with everyone else that the most lacking area is complex documents not playing nice with MS Office. The second most cited shortcoming is the relatively confusing menus. I cannot really disagree there either. And there is always two sides to the coin. LOO’s brightside is shinier than ever. Less noticed is how much this version has pulled away to lead over Apache Open Office (AOO) formally known as Open Office Organization (OOO).
More about that later.
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How to use a Playstation 2 joypad with Linux

Articles, Guides 6 Responses »

Jun 122013

Thanks to all the Indie games, Steam and Humble Bundle recently the market of games for Linux has become most active than ever and so I’ve bought some arcade/action/platform games.

Perhaps it’s just me but I don’t like too much to manage around 10 different keys on the keyboard and remember all the combo that I’ve to do with them, a joypad it’s a much simpler way to play that kind of games, and what’s the best joypad around ?

In my opinion Playstation joypads are some of the best you can find around, probably Xbox are good too, but I’ve an unused playstation 2 and so I’ve choose to go in that direction.

And I must say that with a great surprise everything worked fine without too much problems !!

Out test with Linux Mint 15 Olivia, Cinnamon edition

Articles, Opinion, Reviews 1 Response »

Jun 102013

I’ve changed the GNU/Linux distribution of my home computer from Xubuntu to Mint (XFCE edition) 2 releases ago, and from that date I’ve never regret it, so while I wait for the release of the XFCE edition of Olivia (the code name of Mint 15), I’m glad to publish an interesting article of Manuel and it’s experiences with the Cinnamon edition of Mint 15.
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The new version of Linux Mint has just been released. The developers have arrived at version 15, the nick name of this version is Olivia. A lot of the changes are specified in the release notes. Among the most striking a new managment for the proprietary drivers and the repository. The writer already used successfully Mint, but in the variant with the XFCE desktop environment. This time, it was decided to give credit to the developers of Mint and use the official version with Cinnamon instead of XFCE.

No more pleasantries. The new Mint soon proved to be a bomb, with really gew things to complain about. Installed as usual directly from an USB stick, in around twenty minutes we had everything set and ready. All the hardware of our laptop Dell Inspiron 1525 has been recognized on the fly, but we had to turn on the of the proprietary wireless driver in order to use the wireless connection. A few automatic updates remained to be done, and so, we started with our tests.
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Work with PDF on Linux with PDFTk

Guides, Reviews No Responses »

Jun 092013

PDFtk or The PDF Toolkit is an open source cross-platform tool for manipulating PDF documents. pdftk is basically a front end to the iText library (compiled to Native code using GCJ), capable of splitting, merging, encrypting, decrypting, uncompressing, recompressing, and repairing PDFs.

If pdf is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and x-ray-glasses.
pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with pdf documents. keep one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to: