Category: Linux

May 06, 2013

Converting a diagram made in PowerPoint to a postscript file (so it can be included in a LaTeX document) is a complex multistep process. Below are the steps I follow:

• Print the slide with the diagram to a PDF using CutePDF (using PowerPoint's Save As PDF option will result in a huge postscript file in the end)
• Run the following sequence of commands, setting the NAME variable to the name of the PDF file, sans extension:

  NAME=mydiagram; pdfcrop $NAME.pdf; pdf2ps -r300 $NAME-crop.pdf; \
  mv $NAME-crop.ps $NAME.ps; rm $NAME-crop.pdf

Categories: Linux

Tags: latex, pdf, postscript, powerpoint

August 22, 2012

pdftk - The PDF Toolkit is a handy tool for merging PDFs (and many other manipulations, e.g., removing pages from a PDF). On major Linux distributions, it can be installed with yum or apt. To merge multiple PDFs into a single PDF, execute a command similar to:

pdftk inputA.pdf inputB.pdf inputC.pdf cat output output.pdf

The above command creates a new PDF called output.pdf which includes all pages from the PDFs inputA.pdf, inputB.pdf, and inputC.pdf.

Categories: Linux

Tags: pdf

February 16, 2012

Fedora 13 does not have all the necessary dependencies for Firefox 10, so I needed to downgrade to Firefox 9. I finally managed to find the installers at: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases

Categories: Linux

Tags: fedora, firefox

October 13, 2011

There is a bug in Ubuntu Lucid’s sshd (SSH server) that causes issues with IPv6-enabled network interfaces preventing X11 forwarding over SSH from working properly. The error in /var/log/auth.log is:

error: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket.

To fix the issue, you need to tell sshd to only listen to IPv4. Add the following line at the top of /etc/ssh/sshd_config (before the Port configuration):

AddressFamily inet

Solution is from: http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~hmleung/wordpress/?p=876

Categories: Linux, Networking

Tags: ssh, ubuntu

September 09, 2011

Fedora defaults to persisting iptables (the Linux firewall) between restarts, but this is not the default case in Ubuntu. To have iptables persist between reboots in Ubuntu, you can install the iptables-persistent package:

sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent

sudo iptables-save< /etc/iptables/rules

Solution is from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo#Configuration_on_startup

Categories: Linux, Networking

Tags: iptables, ubuntu

August 11, 2011

To have a window receive focus when you move your mouse over it in Gnome, you need to change a setting in gconf-editor. If gconf-editor is not installed, you can install it by running yum install gconf-editor as root. Run gconf-editor as the user whose mouse over behavior should be changed. Navigate to /apps/metacity/general. Change the value of the key focus_mode to mouse.

Categories: Linux

Tags: gnome

May 17, 2011

A laptop that was dist upgraded from 10.11 to 11.04 was not applying the correct Gnome themes. Changing the theme in Appearances did not fix the issue. The solution was to uninstall the gnome-accessibility-themes package and install the gnome-themes-standard package. This can be done with the commands:

sudo apt-get purge gnome-accessibility-themes
sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-standard

This blog posted is based on a forum post at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1725221&page=2

Categories: Linux

Tags: gnome, ubuntu

May 06, 2011

To install SNMP on Ubuntu, run the commands below (as root):

apt-get install -y snmpd

CONFIG="/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf"
mv $CONFIG $CONFIG.bak
echo rocommunity  public > $CONFIG
echo syslocation  "put location here" >> $CONFIG
echo syscontact   youremail@yourdomain.com >> $CONFIG

CONFIG="/etc/default/snmpd"
mv $CONFIG $CONFIG.bak
cat $CONFIG.bak | grep -v SNMPDOPTS > $CONFIG
echo "SNMPDOPTS='-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid \
        -c /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf'" >> $CONFIG

service snmpd restart

echo "Installed snmpd"

If you have a firewall, you will also need to allow UDP traffic on port 161. If you use iptables this can be accomplished with

iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m udp --dport 161 -j ACCEPT

You can test if SNMP is working by running snmpwalk from another machine:

snmpwalk -v 1 -c public -O e hostname

This blog posted is based on documentation at http://www.it-slav.net/blogs/2009/02/05/install-and-configure-snmp-on-ubuntu.

Categories: Linux, Networking

Tags: snmp, ubuntu

May 05, 2011

Many sources exist to help with setting up automated network installations of Ubuntu. Below are a list of sources I used to get automated network installations of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narhwal) working.

• Instructions on setting up the DHCP, TFTP, and PXELinux part of the process (instructions are for Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn but most of the directions are still applicable)
• Ubuntu documentation on the contents of the pressed file
• Configuration to get keyboard preseeding to work (which is different from earlier versions of Ubuntu)

Categories: Linux

Tags: pxe, ubuntu

March 29, 2011

I wanted to use the intel X11 driver with my Lenovo X201 laptop. However, X11 was failing to start, with the following error message in the log:

intel(0): No kernel modesetting driver detected

i915.modeset

Categories: Linux

Tags: fedora, x11

Older Entries >>