How to Install and Configure NVIDIA Graphics Card in FreeBSD

 

[SKIP - NOT USED] Install driver for NVIDIA Graphics Card

pkg install nvidia-driver

sysrc kld_list+="nvidia nvidia-modeset"

sysrc linux_enable="YES" 

[SKIP - NOT USED] Configure the NVIDIA driver in a configuration file

cat >> /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf << EOF
Section "Device"
    Identifier "Card0"
    Driver     "nvidia"

    BusID     "pci0:0:1:0"  
EndSection

EOF

[SKIP - NOT USED] NVIDIA configuration (it creates /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

pkg install nvidia-xconfig

nvidia-xconfig

How to get VMs with specific custom attribute?

Here is the Onliner to list VMs with custom attribute "Last Backup" ...

Get-VM | Select-Object Name, @{N='LastBackup';E={($_.CustomFields | Where-Object {$_.Key -match "Last Backup"}).Value}} | Where-Object {$_.LastBackup -ne $null -and $_.LastBackup -ne ""}

and here is the another one to count the number of such VMs ...

Get-VM | Select-Object Name, @{N='LastBackup';E={($_.CustomFields | Where-Object {$_.Key -match "Last Backup"}).Value}} | Where-Object {$_.LastBackup -ne $null -and $_.LastBackup -ne ""} | Measure-Object | Select-Object Count

 

How to get all VMs restarted by VMware vSphere HA? PowerCLI OneLiner below will do the magic ...

Get-VIEvent -MaxSamples 100000 -Start (Get-Date).AddDays(-1) -Type Warning | Where {$_.FullFormattedMessage -match "restarted"} | select CreatedTime,FullFormattedMessage | sort CreatedTime -Descending | Format-Table

How to compress PDF file in Linux

I'm using Linux Mint with xsane for scanning documents on my old but still good Canon MX350 printer/scanner. Scans are saved as huge PDF documents (for example 50 MB) and I would like to compress it to consume much less disk space.

Install Ghostscript

apt install ghostscript

Compress the file input.pdf

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output_compressed.pdf input.pdf

Let's break down these options

• -sDEVICE=pdfwrite: Tells Ghostscript to output a PDF file.
• -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4: Sets the PDF version. Version 1.4 is quite old but widely compatible and often allows for good compression. You can try 1.5 or 1.6 for slightly more modern features and potentially better compression in some cases.
• -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook: This is the main compression control. As mentioned, /ebook usually gives a good balance.
• -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH: These make Ghostscript run silently and non-interactively.
• -sOutputFile=output_compressed.pdf: Specifies the name of the compressed output file.
• input.pdf: original 50 MB PDF.

Lossy compression (322x) from 50 MB to 155 KB without any visible degradation is worth to keep cloud (Google drive) costs low.

My VIM configuration file

My preferred editor in unix-like systems is vi or vim. VI is everywhere and VIM is improved for scripting and coding.