Sunday, August 21, 2011

protecting a section / paragraph in a document

Here are the two ways which I protect portions of a document:

 ...wanting to protect it often occurs for important content which I'll also frame (hence protecting frames)

But sometimes I just want to protect a block of text to prevent accidental overtyping...

 Create a section, then paste in your text, and then 'protect' the section. Example...



Don't let the actual text (gcc / pthread, etc) put you off, I just wanted to show a real world example.

Here I have included in my document some commands, which I will later use as reference. What I don't want to happen is to accidentally overtype some of those commands whilst editing my document, and losing the concrete reference.

Frames or Sections, both will do a job for you in protecting a block of content - choose whichever you find most convenient :)


Notes and Further Reading:

How to protect a section is discussed in Chapter 4 of the LibreOffice / OpenOffice documentation (links below)

 Chapter 4 pdf is 1.4MB and the .odt version is much smaller.

If you have LibreOffice or OpenOffice installed then you might have local copies accessed by pressing F1 (help)

Monday, August 8, 2011

move / resize partitions - the zero cost way

There was a time when resizing and moving partitions required a trip to the computer store for some software.

No longer the case.

GNU Fdisk is a feature rich fdisk replacement that supports many options including:

  • v - move a partition
  • c - rescue a lost partition
  • z - resize a partition
  • h - check the consistency of a partition
  • o - copy the partition over another partition
By default GNU Fdisk will work in 'compatibility mode', so as to aid users who are making the switch from traditional fdisk.

So options v, c, z, h, o would not show in your menu.

However the -G flag turns off the compatibility mode.


By running gfdisk -G /dev/sda the extra options are available.

( Replace /dev/sda above with whatever your disk device identifier is )

In Debian GNU / Linux you will find GNU Fdisk here.

If all this is too much command line, then there is gparted for a clickable alternative:

gparted list and resize