free pdf viewer with hand tool

epdfview is a fast and simple pdf viewer with default hand tool to pan the pdf document.

epdfview is just 125 kilobytes download size in ubuntu/debian and renders pdf well

 By default it  has the hand tool enabled and we can use mouse to drag the document up and down. When doing this mouse pointer changes to hand cursor


This is unlike evince default document viewer of gnome, which has hand tool only on middle click of mouse which is cumbersome with my stupid mouse


 installing epdfview in ubuntu/debian  is one step away, using the following command line (or tick epdfview from synaptic)


sudo apt-get install epdfview

debian squeeze on netbook uses less than 100 MB RAM on startup

One of the linux distributions optimal for a netbook is debian squeeze. When starting and logging in to gnome, debian hardly uses 85MB RAM (95 MB RAM with swap)! Even when firefox is running, it did not cross 150 MB RAM

RAM usage on startup without enabling swap was lesser than 90 MB


RAM usage after swap enabling

RAM usage when running firefox

After trying various distributions for almost an year, debian squeeze feels the optimal linux distribution for this netbook (Ideapad S10). All applications launch very fast and gives a feel it is running on a core2.

It is hard to install debian testing on to a netbook with wireless, but it is worth the effort.

debian on HDTV screenshots

Can debian support HDTV? debian or Windows, it all depends on graphics card and debian looks pretty on a big TV screen. And what not, when playing movie using xbmc,  it makes you forget that you are running debian

If you have an nvidia graphics card with DVI out, get a DVI-HDMI adapter and connect to your HDTV using HDMI cable (If it has HDMI output, it is straightforward). Then boot into debian, open nvidia control panel and adjust screen resolution as much as you wish.

You will be surprised to see debian maintains low profile, yet giving you the user complete control of your system

Click to open the HD screenshot in new tab (or new window)

All that glitters is not gold

This is my personal experience of how I spent around 10 hours to get windows 7 professional upgrade installed in my box.

At the end when I was so much irritated and upset that windows 7 upgrade did not install in my box and about to switch off my system and wanted to run... run run away, something in the corner of my mind told me to give another try and it worked

The problem I found was surprising. My system has 3 hard disks and 2 has debian installed on it and one of them windows . The problem is windows could not install/upgrade if the windows hard disk is not set as first in the bios driver order

Without knowing this, I wiped clean my windows installation. Fortunately, I took a copy of my ntfs partition as a tar file inside debian.

(Mount ntfs partition containing windows inside linux (ubuntu/debian/...), select Ctrl +A and right click, create archive, select archive format as tar and save it in your home partition for extracting it later)


So when something in my mind pricked to try again,  I booted into debian, created a new ntfs partition, extracted the contents of tarball (zip) of ntfs partition in the newly created ntfs partition, set the boot flag on ntfs partition and rebooted

I just changed the hard disk order in bios to bring harddisk with windows as the first. Then started my upgrade and it went without a hitch!!

After installing, I modified the hard disk order (back to make debian boot first) in bios and changed my grub in debian to bring an entry for windows 7.

Now I wanted to share my experience so that someone can change the hard disk ordering in bios to give windows 7 upgrade another try when they have multiple hard disk

Here is a screenshot of both windows 7 professional and debian

Windows 7 looks shiny and gorgeous.

You know, there is a proverb "All that glitters is not gold"