AAARGH! I’d forgotten the mockery of aesthetics that is “fonts in Linux.” Since I work with Classical Greek, I need to be able to distinguish otherwise incidental markings (e.g., whether an accent leans right or left). Also, the ability to type classical Greek and use the extended Latin keymap is almost mandatory for work on [...]
Dec 142011
Dropbox is a tool that syncs a particular folder on your computer with the cloud, in a sense it’s an instant backup of the most recent changes. You can then access this folder via the internet or on any other computer with Dropbox installed. In other words, it’s especially handy when your computer stops working [...]
Dec 112011
While proctoring my students’ final I’ve been tweaking the system a bit (after finally getting on UT’s Restricted network) and now I’m going to try to get ACPI up and running so I can suspend to disk instead of shutting down every time the computer needs to be moved. Gentoo is as accommodating as ever [...]
Dec 102011
Another Gentoo guide is available for this task, although it was written for TeX Live 2008 (three years out of date). I’ll take a look through, and hopefully it will not require much (any) modification. The install was straight-forward enough <code># emerge texlive</code> But at the end I end up with the following error: <code> [...]
Dec 092011
If I remember right, this is the least problematic issue with this laptop and Linux. As always, I go to the Gentoo guide. My sound card is an ALi M5451 PCI card, but for some reason I had USB and PCMCIA support built into the kernel. I am disabling these options, as well as OSS [...]
Of course Gentoo has a guide for configuring the synaptics touchpad. Basically, I should have included “synaptics” in my USE flags, although that alone does not give me tapping or right-edge scrolling, but for the time being, the added precision should be enough. I will revisit this issue. UPDATE: following a Gentoo Wiki I can [...]
To achieve a secure wireless connection I think I should be able to just toggle a few settings on the router and wicd’s GUI. If anything unexpected happens, I’ll describe it. BTW: Thank you Stuff Mom Never Told You, for enriching my mind as I bang it against things. UPDATE: Good news! It took a [...]
Dec 092011
Well! The important things have been taken care of now. Before I call it a night, though, there are a few important things I want to do: Set up some protection for the route (UPDATE: achieved!) Configure the synaptics touchpad on the computer; it currently has limited functionality, but is very sensitive (making it difficult [...]
Ha! It seems that the problem was with my router. I have a Cisco Linksys E1000 capable of b/g, n, or mixed speeds. It seems that there was a problem with the mixed setting, and when I brought it down to b/g connection was possible! Of course, I did have to reset the router to [...]
Ugh, it looks like I need the gtk library for this. Looking at a long install time for wicd. *stretch* Alright, now in /etc/rc.conf I’m adding rc_hotplug=”!net.eth* !net.wlan*” As suggested after wicd emerged. I’m also instructed to update /etc/pam.d/system-login Gentoo has a guide (of course!) for wicd which I will follow until I don’t. # [...]
