Ben Chuanlong Du's Blog

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Tips on Installing Debian Series of Linux Distributions

Before Installation

Debian Specific

  1. You'd better not install back ported Debian images, as it might cause issues with other software (e.g., VirtualBox). It is suggested that you use Debian test.

Other Debian-based Linux Distributions

  1. Download the right ISO image of the Linux distribution that you want to install.

  2. Create …

Get CentOS Version

You can get the version of CentOS using the following command.

rpm -q centos-release

This trick can be used to get the version of the CentOS distribution on a Spark cluster. Basically, you run this command in the driver or workers to print the versions and then parse the log …

Convert PDF to EPS

There are tons of tools for converting PDF pictures to EPS pictures in Linux. The pdf2ps command is a good one. It produces EPS pictures without losing much resolution. The general purpose tools convert (from the ImageMagick package) does not produce as good quality EPS figures.

Best Filesystem Format for Cross-platform Data Exchanging

FAT32

FAT32 is an outdated filesystem. The maximum size for a single file is 4G. You should instead exFAT instead of FAT32 where possible.

exFAT

exFAT is great cross-platform filesystem that is support out-of-box by Windows, Linux and macOS. There is practically no limit (big enough for average users) on …

Fonts for Linux

  1. ttf-arphic-uming, ttf-wqy-microhei, ttf-wqy-zenhei, xfonts-wqy and ttf-opensymbol are some packages related to Chinese fonts.

  2. If you have Adobe Reader installed on your computer, you can use Adobe Chinese fonts for free.

  3. To check Chinese fonts installed on your computer, you can use the command fc-list :lang=zh-cn | sort.

  4. To install extra …