GNU/Linux

I had so many problems using DVD-RAM on Linux. I formatted them as ext2 and mounted the device /dev/sr0 directly, and wondered why there were so many SCSI-errors. I retried formatting as UDF, but this wasn’t better either. With UDF, the writing process didn’t even finish overnight!

I finally found out what the problem was: I should have used Packet Writing. With this, and together with UDF and certain mount options, it finally worked, thanks to a (German) Linux DVD-RAM HOWTO.

In short: Load the pktcdvd kernel module (or compile support into your kernel). Then issue the pktsetup command as told in the HOWTO (or have a corresponding init-script do it). Format (or keep, if you just bought it) your DVD-RAM as UDF; the UDF revision is only important if you want to share the disk with old operating systems (such as Win2k). Then mount your disk using the options rw,noatime,async,users. I had to switch from kernel 2.6.15 to 2.6.17, as otherwise I got a

pktcdvd: Wrong disc profile (0)

For my mathematical Master’s thesis, I already downloaded and printed out some research papers—and that term already refers to the material it is printed on: To save paper, I like to print them out fitting two pages on one. To achieve this, I create a separate postscript document with the desired layout. I don’t want my printer to do that calculations, as it is not that flexible. psutils is the package of choice for manipulating Postscript documents. It contains the command pstops to convert—literally—Postscript to Postscript. The standard version of fitting two pages on one is:

pstops ‘2:0L@.7(21cm,0)+1L@.7(21cm,14.85cm)’ infile.ps outfile.ps

This arrangement is exact. You might find the font size a bit too small, and the white margins offer you to have the text enlarged a bit. My modified version, which reduces whitespace and enlarges the text by 20%, is:

pstops ‘2:0L@.85(23.85cm,-1.5cm)+1L@.85(23.85cm,12.5cm)’ infile.ps outfile.ps

I even came over an article, rendered on A4, but only using the area of A5-pages for the text. Every actual A5-page was centered on a single A4-page. So I needed no magnification, but only different shifts:

pstops ‘2:0L(24.075cm,-2.175cm)+1L(24.075cm,10.5cm)’ infile.ps outfile.ps