Tuesday, February 24, 2009

 

Step-by-step Installing Sumatra PDF viewer


  1. Visit Sumatra PDF download page and click on SumatraPDF-0.9.3-install.exe link


  2. Click "Run" on both "Security Warning" windows





  3. Following the SumatraPDF installation instructions to complete the installation







  4. SumatraPDF can now be launched from "start" menu



  5. Click "Yes" when SumatraPDF asks "Associate with PDF files?". This would allow you to double-click on any PDF file and be able to view its content with SumatraPDF


  6. Use "File" and "Open" menu to open any existing PDF file


  7. The toolbar contains icons for quick operations, such as "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out". Just try them out.

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Sunday, February 01, 2009

 

Running SLAX 6.0.9 on a 512MB USB drive

SLAX was top of the list on The LiveCD List (http://www.livecdlist.com/) site and the description shows that it has very minimum disk requirement, so I feel that I should give it a try.

Without further thinking, I decided to install SLAX on my wife's broken MP3 player (a BENQ joybee). After all, this device has 512MB and the maximum size requirement for SLAX is only 193MB.

Following the instructions on the SLAX official site (http://www.slax.org/), it is very easy to put the pre-packaged SLAX onto the device.

Here are the steps done from Windows PC (just a reminder to myself) -

  1. download the SLAX tarball (http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php?download=tar)
  2. clean up MP3
  3. untar SLAX tarball to root of MP3 player
  4. execute /boot/bootinst.bat to make MP3 player bootable (pay extra attention to make sure the script does work on the correct driver)

After that, restart the PC, hit the (or whatever key to get into BIOS), and make sure the PC boots up from USB driver.

A nice boot-up screen shows up. And all I have to is to hit to boot into SLAX.


TA.DA!! === a standalone Linux PC is now running with KDE ===


The first thing I want is network connectivity. Although SLAX recognizes most of my network devices, I have to customize SLAX a little bit.



TA.DA!! === a connected Linux PC running from a 512MB USB ===


Now, I would like to be able to view Web pages in Asian languages (especially, Traditional Chinese & Japanese). For this, I searched and read many informative web pages, even download a few ISOs just to extract a few packages (see the bottoms for all links).

I still haven't fully understand how it works, but after adding following items, my SLAX is now capable of displaying Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

1. Downloaded glibc-i18n-2.7-noarch-17.tgz and converted it to LZM (using tgz2lzm). Because the USB drive has very limited space, I have to modified "tgz2lzm" so that it uses my harddisk (instead of the USB drive) as temporary storage.


root@slax:/root# diff `which tgz2lzm` ../../customize/root/bin/tgz2lzm
18c18,19
< tmpdir="/tmp/tgz2lzm$$"> TMP=${TMP:=/tmp}
> TMPDIR=${TMP}/tgz2lzm$$


The glibc-i18n-2.7-noarch-17.lzm is placed under /slax/base

2. Downloaded Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts. Here what I have put under /slax/modules. They are all *.mo and renamed to *.lzm.


TA.DA!! === a multilingual Linux PC ===


Still, I have a few things want to achieve, like be able to input Traditioanl Chinese & Japanese, be able to play music, and so on, but these will be my homewok for the next few weeks or so



Reference URLs (in no particular order):

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