Year: 2011

October 18, 2011

Below is the Makefile I use for compiling ACM publications. The LATEX, BIBTEX, PDF, and PS variables should be changed to the absolute paths of latex, bibtex, ps2pdf, and dvips, respectively, if they cannot be found from your PATH environment variable. The variables WORKINGBASE and CAMERABASE should be changed to the name of the main LaTeX file (excluding .tex extension) for your working (i.e., draft) and camera-ready versions, respectively. Use the working (or default) target to compile the working version and the camera target to compile the camera-ready version.

Makefile

LATEX = latex
BIBTEX = bibtex

PDF = ps2pdf
PDF_FLAGS = -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.2 -dSubsetFonts=true \
-dEmbedAllFonts=true  -dEPSCrop=true

PS = dvips
PS_FLAGS = -P cmz -t letter

WORKINGBASE = main
CAMERABASE = final

default: working

working: version $(WORKINGBASE).pdf

camera: $(CAMERABASE).pdf
    gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=$<.tmp $<
    mv $<.tmp $<

version:
    svnversion > version.tex

%.pdf: %.ps
    $(PDF) $(PDF_FLAGS) $< 

.PRECIOUS:%.ps
%.ps: %.dvi
    $(PS) $(PS_FLAGS) $< -o $@

$(WORKINGBASE).dvi: $(wildcard *.tex) $(wildcard *.bib) $(wildcard images/*.eps)
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(BIBTEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}

$(CAMERABASE).dvi: $(wildcard *.tex) $(wildcard *.bib) $(wildcard images/*.eps)
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}

clean:
    rm -rRf *.dvi *.aux *.blg *.log *.ps *~ *.bbl *.pdf *.out

I also set the svn:ignore property on the subversion directories in which LaTeX files and Makefile are stored. Run

svn propedit svn:ignore .

*.aux
*.bbl
*.blg
*.log
*.dvi
*.ps
version.tex
main.pdf

(Change main.pdf to whatever is stored in the WORKINGBASE variable in the Makefile, plus the .pdf extension.)

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: acm, latex

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

July 25, 2011

As a computer science graduate student, compiling LaTeX publications for conferences is a frequent task. For the draft and submission versions, compilation settings are not as particular, but a final camera ready version has certain requirements, such as a PDF with embedded fonts. I have built a Makefile that allows me to compile everything from my early drafts to the final camera-ready version that meets the requirements of typical ACM publications.

The Makefile assumes your main LaTeX file is called main.tex (change the value assigned to the BASE variable if yours is different). Also, the camera-ready compilation process assumes you have a single latex file called camera.tex that contains all tex files and the bbl, the compiled bibliography (change the value assigned to the CAMERABASE variable if yours is different).

LATEX = latex
BIBTEX = bibtex

PDF = ps2pdf
PDF_FLAGS = -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress

PS = dvips
PS_FLAGS = -t letter

BASE = main
CAMERABASE = camera

.PRECIOUS:$(CAMERABASE).ps

all: version $(BASE).pdf

camera: $(CAMERABASE).pdf

version:
    svnversion > version.tex

%.pdf: %.ps
    $(PDF) $(PDF_FLAGS) $< 

%.ps: %.dvi
    $(PS) $(PS_FLAGS) $< -o $@

$(BASE).dvi: $(wildcard *.tex) $(wildcard *.bib) $(wildcard images/*.eps)
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(BIBTEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}

$(CAMERABASE).dvi: $(wildcard *.tex) $(wildcard *.bib) $(wildcard images/*.eps)
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}
    $(LATEX) ${@:.dvi=}

clean:
    rm -rf *.dvi *.aux *.blg *.log $ *~ *.bbl *.out
    rm -rf (BASE).ps $(BASE).pdf $(CAMERABASE).pdf

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: latex, subversion

July 06, 2011

To perform text processing on a CSV file row-by-row, you can use awk. A single row can be split into columns using the split command. The data can be output as desired using the print command. The example below outputs the 1st and 3rd columns of a CSV file:

cat myfile.csv | awk '{ split($0,a,","); print a[1]","a[3]; }'

It is important to note that awk uses one-based array indexing (not zero-based).

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: awk

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

May 02, 2011

To enable uploads (images and PDFs) in MediaWiki, make the following changes to the LocalSettings.php file for the installation:

1. Change the line

   $wgEnableUploads       = false;

   to

   $wgEnableUploads       = true;

2. Add the line

   $wgFileExtensions = array_merge($wgFileExtensions, array('pdf'));

   to also allow PDFs to be uploaded.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: mediawiki

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