ubuntu pdf printer

from a blogger on setting up pdf print

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/print-to-pdf-using-cups-pdf/

Print to PDF using cups-pdf March 23, 2006

Posted by ubuntonista in ubuntu. trackback

I have been looking for a solution to print any file to pdf using a pdf printer driver.

cups-pdf is the package I was looking for apparently. But unfortunately, this takes just a little setting up.

Install cups-pdf by using:
$sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and change the line that says:
RunAsUser Yes
to
RunAsUser No

Restart cupsys:
$sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Add a new printer (System->Administration->Printing) selecting the “Local Printer” “PDF Printer” option. In the next step choose “Generic Printer” and then used the “Postscript Color Printer (Ver 3)” driver.

Now you should be able to print to pdf by selecting the newly setup printer.

Cribs:
1) The output .pdf files are stored in your “Home” directory. I can’t find a way to change this output directory to something of my liking
2) The output files are named with pre-defined names (job_8-untitled_document.pdf is an example). It would have been nice to select a name while printing.
3) One shouldn’t have to edit the cupsd.conf file to enable printing! (I found that I might have to edit the configuration file by visiting the homepage of the package, and trying out what I did). At the very least, the README.Debian file for the package should have informed me of the need to edit the configuration file.

tomcat 5 unable to install as service

During Tomcat (service version, not the zip one) installation, when encounter tomcat "failed to install tomcat5 service", here is the tips to resolve this error:

Try uninstall all previous Tomcat first
Then goto regedit, and search for tomcat, and try and delete all the entries with Tomcat service related.

Then from an online post by "Ab"

There is an Internet God after all. It took me all day but the reason I got this error was that the installer on one of my servers (2 others worked just fine) did not like my temporary working dir. I changed the temp dir to c:\temp and the setup completed. If you get this error right click on my computer, select properties, from the advanced tab click on Environment Variables and change your temporary working folder to c:\temp. Good luck, This drove me nuts all day. Thank you http://www.sysinternals.com for filemon which helped me figure this out.

compiling vmware-config w/ ubuntu linux-headers

Just a reminder for a little trick to compile for vmware config, create a symlink within /usr/src as 'linux' that points to whatever kernel version you're running.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root src 46 2006-09-21 02:08 linux -> /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.15-27-amd64-generic/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 2007-02-11 18:22 linux-headers-2.6.15-26-amd64-generic/
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4.0K 2006-12-18 20:48 linux-headers-2.6.15-27/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K 2006-12-18 20:48 linux-headers-2.6.15-27-amd64-generic/
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4.0K 2007-02-11 18:35 linux-headers-2.6.15-28/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K 2007-02-11 18:35 linux-headers-2.6.15-28-amd64-generic/