Bulk renaming PDFs to their Title names from PDF Metadata

Recently, i realized that I have amassed a huge number of e-books over the years and have ended up dumping them within an e-books directory on my laptop. The problem that I now faced was identifying one book from the other because a lot of them had random filenames based upon where I had downloaded them from.

So I now had a couple of requirements:

1. An automated way of renaming all of these e-books to their actual titles.
2. Removing all duplicate files.

After a little bit of looking around and experimenting around I finally got a Python based solution by Joseph Monaco to my problem. I then forked the orginal repo and added a couple of scripts to it to do my bidding. Now all that I need to do to auto organize all my e-books was this:-

1. git clone https://github.com/sayak-sarkar/pdf-title-rename
2. export PYTHONPATH=${PYTHONPATH}:$(pwd)/xmp.py
3. python pdf-title-rename/pdf-title-rename.py <PATH to my ebooks directory>/*
4. ./remove_duplicate.sh

And voila, all of my e-books were now auto renamed to their titles! 🙂

Come to think about it, I can work on repository a bit more to turn it into a full blown package, but then again, I’m feeling a bit lazy now that my goal’s served! Feel free to send me a Pull Request on GitHub if any of you want to automate it further! 😉

Using Vim to generate HTML output of code

This is an interesting bit that I learnt about from an email in a mailing list by James Pryor.

To generate html output for code within a shell script you can use:

vim myscript.sh '+syntax on' '+ set nu' '+set background=light' +TOhtml '+w myscript.html' '+qall!'

If you don’t want numbers and need a dark background you can use:

vim myscript.sh '+syntax on' '+ set nonu' '+set background=dark' +TOhtml '+w myscript.html' '+qall!'

Installing Firefox Nightly with Australis on Fedora 18 / 19 / 20

Screenshot of Firefox Nightly with Australis on Fedora 19

Are you a Fedora user who wants to check out the new Australis Theme for Firefox scheduled for release with Firefox 28? However, you are a bit apprehensive of letting go that stable release of Firefox in bundled within your Fedora installation by default, just in case something goes wrong with the nightly beta release.

If this is what defines your current dilemma, fear not. You can have both the stable as well as the nightly beta versions installed simultaneously in your computer in a few simple steps without any trouble at all! Here’s how to do it in case of Firefox Nightly version 28 [the latest release at the time of writing this post]:-

Step 1: Login as Super User:-

$su

Step 2: Get the nightly package:-

Go to http://nightly.mozilla.org to get the latest available nightly build for your system.

Firefox Nightly Webpage

Alternatively, you can use the command line tool wget to directly download it via the command line as follows:-

#wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-28.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

Step 3: Extract the contents of the tar ball as follows:-

#tar -xvf firefox-28.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

Step 4: Rename the extracted directory to “nightly”:-

#mv firefox nightly

Step 4: Create an installation directory:-

#mkdir /opt/firefox

Step 5: Move the contents of the “nightly” directory to the installation directory:-

#mv /nightly /opt/firefox/nightly

Step 6: Create a Symbolic link for the Nightly installation:-

#ln -s /opt/firefox/nightly/firefox /usr/local/bin/nightly

Step 7:Run Firefox Nightly by typing the following within the command line or the alt+f2 launcher:-

For command line: $nightly

For alt+f2: nightly

Step 8: Relax and enjoy the Australis awesomeness! 🙂

Installing Skype on Fedora 18 / 19 / 20

Here’s a list of command line steps to install Skype on Fedora 19:-

Step 1: Open up the terminal and switch to super user:

$su –

Step 2: Install the dependencies:

yum install alsa-lib.i686 fontconfig.i686 freetype.i686 glib2.i686 libSM.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686 libXi.i686 libXrandr.i686 libXrender.i686 libXv.i686 libstdc++.i686 pulseaudio-libs.i686 qt.i686 qt-x11.i686 qtwebkit.i686 zlib.i686

Step 3: Download Skype 4.2 Dynamic package for Fedora into /tmp:

cd /tmp
wget –trust-server-names http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-dynamic

Step 4: Extract the Skype 4.2 package to /opt:

mkdir /opt/skype
tar xvf skype-4.2* -C /opt/skype –strip-components=1

Step 5: Create Launcher, Link icons, language and sounds:

ln -s /opt/skype/skype.desktop /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop
ln -s /opt/skype/icons/SkypeBlue_48x48.png /usr/share/icons/skype.png
ln -s /opt/skype/icons/SkypeBlue_48x48.png /usr/share/pixmaps/skype.png

touch /usr/bin/skype
chmod 755 /usr/bin/skype

Open /usr/bin/skype with text editor and add following content:

#!/bin/sh
export SKYPE_HOME=”/opt/skype”

$SKYPE_HOME/skype –resources=$SKYPE_HOME $*

Step 6: Congratulate yourself! You have successfully installed a non-free proprietary software on top of free Open Source software and bent down to corporate needs. Now go ahead and configure Skype according to your needs!

Sigh!

Installing Sublime Text 2 on Fedora 18 / 19 / 20

Here’s another three step guide to installing Sublime Text 2 on Fedora 19 – Schrodinger’s Cat:-

1. Download the installation script from the following gist.

   https://gist.github.com/sayak-sarkar/5810101

2. Extract it to your home directory [or anywhere you like].

   $tar -xvf gist5810101-3b0e9bb3ef5128760df9e3e06877fa4f7e5689ec.tar.gz

3. Open your terminal (preferably as super user), navigate to your home directory and execute the shell script.

    #./sublime-text-2.sh

Voila!! You now have Sublime Text 2 installed on your machine. You may run it from the terminal or via the alt+f2 shortcut by simply typing in “sublime-text”.

Credits to Henrique Moody for the original script gist!!
I’ve simply added a symbolic link at /usr/bin to enable terminal execution. 😉

Enjoy!! 🙂

Installing VLC player on Fedora 18 / 19 / 20

Here’s a simple three step guide to installing VLC media player on Fedora 19 [Schrodinger’s Cat]:-

1. Login as Super User:
   • $su
2. Setup rpmfusion:
   • #rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
3. Install vlc using the default yum package manager:
   • #yum install vlc mozilla-vlc

Voila! You now have VLC media player installed on you computer! 🙂

Installing Microsoft TrueType Fonts in Fedora18 / 19 / 20

This is something that I just learned how to do, courtesy of a documentation work that I need to for my college’s fourth semester evaluations, where the requirements state that I need to use Arial / Verdana fonts for my Project Report. The interesting part is that I’m a hardcore Fedora user who uses LibreOffice for all my documentation purposes and as obvious as it may sound, these fonts don’t come pre-installed in Fedora 18. Du-uh? Right? So, I had to distinctly install these fonts on my laptop. How did I do it? Here’s the breakdown.

First here’s a bit of a trivia for those who already don’t know this! (Read: Yack):

Microsoft TrueType fonts (TTFs) are quite commonly found throughout the web, usually specified in stylesheets. However, for Linux users, the most common of these TTFs don’t come pre-installed in most of the common distributions by default. Instead, they are replaced by generic equivalents, usually fallback fonts most commonly defined in stylesheets (again!). This is also true even case of offline documents such as spreadsheets, presentations, or plain .doc files.

Installing TrueType font packages allow you to see content created using these fonts just as the content creator originally intended.

The Microsoft TrueType fonts package includes the following font-families:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black/Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

And here’s the part on how to install these fonts! (Read: Hack):

You can install the MS core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package. Here’s how to do it. The gist describes what to do, and the commands explain how to do using the Terminal. You may need superuser privileges or sudo configured. :-

1. Make sure you have the following rpm-packages installed. Any version should do.
   • rpm-build,
   • wget,
   • A package that provides the ttmkfdir utility. For Fedora Core, ttmkfdir should suffice.
2. Download the latest msttcorefonts spec file from here.
   • cd /tmp
   • wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.5-1.spec
3. Install the cabextract utility.
   • sudo yum install rpm-build cabextract ttmkfdir
4. Build the msttcorefonts-2.5-1.noarch.rpm package.
   • $ sudo rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.5-1.spec
5. Install the fonts:
   • $ sudo yum install /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.5-1.noarch.rpm

Installing Steam for Linux Beta | Counter Strike for Fedora 17 / 18 / 19 / 20

Here’s the link to a really interesting article by Russel Bryant that I found on the web. Especially helpful for all my geeky gamer friends who keep on complaining about how they are not able to play Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2 on their Linux based systems. Enjoy!

If however you are a counter strike freak and this link doesn’t completely satiate your needs, you may try referring to this blog for Chris Daniel’s take on installing Counter Strike on Fedora 18.