Handling tif image produced by MS Office Document Scanning

I scanned a paper using MS Office Document Scanning (on Windows XP) and the output was a tiff image file. Using file command, I could see the file type as below:

image.tif: TIFF image data, little-endian

As usual, I wanted to open it with a image editing software like gimp or imagemagick or krita or even with document viewer like okular but to no avail. The error produced by GIMP was: unsupported layout, No RGBA loader. The error produced by Krita was: Cannot create storage. I tried convert a utility packaged with imagemagick to convert the image to jpg :

[zamri@triniton KINGSTON]# convert image.tif -quality 90 kpd.jpg

I got this error:
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 512 (0x200) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 513 (0x201) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image: unknown field with tag 514 (0x202) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 37677 (0x932d) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 37678 (0x932e) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 37680 (0x9330) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: compression not supported `image.tif' @ tiff.c/ReadTIFFImage/811.
convert: missing an image filename `kpd.jpg' @ convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/2776.

So I searched the internet and I found the solution on this website. I installed foremost by issuing this command: urpmi foremost. Luckily Mandriva has this utility in its repositories. Then I issued this command:

foremost -i image.tif -o image

The first argument -i is the input file and second arg -o is for the dir where we want to extract the content of the image. It appeared that the tif file was compressed and contained many files including the jpg file that of interest to me. The output of above command was a directory (folder) named image. In the directory,I got:

audit.txt jpg/ ole/

In directory jpg, I got :

00000000.jpg 00000703.jpg

The file named 00000000.jpg was the image file type jpeg that can be opened with any image viewer. The other one was the thumbnail.

Mounting Mac OS X partition from Linux

My friend asked me to save his data on a Mac OS X partition since his machine couldn't boot properly into Mac OS X GUI mode. So I booted the machine with Ubuntu 5.04 Live CD. I know it was an old version but who cares as long as it supports hfsplus filesystem used by Mac OS X.

So I mounted one of the partitions where he saved his work with this:

sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/hda5 /mnt (for Ubuntu)

(If you are using other distro and logged in as root, just omit the sudo from above command.)

where /dev/hda5 is the partition and /mnt is the mount point.

From now, insert usb drive and copy file to it. After this, he can wipe out all partitions and/or reinstall Mac OS X.

KDE 4.3 Beta 1 released for testing

KDE.org announced the release of KDE 4.3 Beta 1 for testing. This is the first review of the 3rd iteration of KDE 4 desktop.

Some highlights of this beta release are:
1.Integration of PolicyKit and Geolocation services
2.More usable Run command pop-up (press alt+F2 to activate)
3. Many new and improved add-ons for plasma
4. Many bugfixes and improvements across all applications and more integration of features coming with the KDE 4 platform
5. New tree mode in System Settings

and many more. For a complete list of changes, you can browse subversion log.

Reference
http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.3-beta1.php