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Welcome to the LinuxFocus May 2001 issue

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Your grandmother does not want to change to Linux?

There are still a lot of Windows users who are hesitant to install Linux. One of the reasons may be that after the 5th complete re-installation of Windows they have decided to not touch it anymore and are now happy that it works most of the time. This is often the case even though most of them would be very interested to see what it is like.

SuSE has found the solution to this problem. It's called SuSE live evaluation CD. It's a complete Linux distribution ready installed onto a single CD. The CD is bootable and there is as well a possibility to generate first a boot floppy in case the computer does not support booting from CD-Rom.

The Live CD is available since SuSE 7.0 and the most recent version is the "live-eval-7.1" for SuSE 7.1.

When booting from this CD you get first the typical SuSE Yast2 installation screen. This is however not a real installation. It is just configuration. During this process 3 files will be created on the first partition of you first IDE disk. It does not matter if it is a Linux ext2 partition or a windows partion the live CD can handle both:

Using this Live CD you can test a full Linux system risk free. No partitioning and re-arranging of data. It just creates these 3 files and there will be no more traces left on your hard disk after removing those files.

This is as well a convenient way to test a new Linux distribution even if you have already Linux installed. Try it and decide then if you should upgrade or if your old distribution is still good enough.
What are the drawbacks? Well, it runs from CD Rom and that means it is a bit slower than a normal Linux system as the reading of data from the CD Rom is a relatively slow process.

You can download an ISO image from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-7.1/. Try as well one of the mirror sites . SuSE's main site is at times quite under load. If you don't have a DSL modem to handle a 650Mb download in reasonable time then you can as well order it from SuSE or perhaps just ask a friend if you can get a copy. There might as well be a number of printed magazines in your country that include the Live evaluation CD into one of there issues.

It's a good way to promote Linux among your friends and perhaps not only your grandmother will finally, be convinced that Linux is the better system and switch to Linux ;-).



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The LinuxFocus Tip

How to print several pages per sheet of paper? Just try this. Hit the print button in netscape (or any other program) and replace the print command with:
psnup -2 | lpr
This will e.g print 2 pages per physical page. psnup is part of a whole set of commands for printing and manipulating postscript called psutils (available from http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/ajcd/psutils/). A very interesting command is e.g psbook. It re-arranges the pages such that you get a A5 book if you print 2 pages per physical page on A4 paper. All you need to do is fold the paper in the middle and staple it. However to do this you need a duplex (double sided) printer. The print command is then:
psbook | psnup -2 | lpr -Pduplex
In this example our duplex printer is called duplex. Even if you don't have a duplex printer psutils are very useful.
This command converts e.g A4 pages to US-letter:
psresize -PA4 -pletter in.ps out.ps



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