Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Ubuntu / dropbox

 If you get the warning
Unable to monitor filesystem
Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.
here's one way to increase the default value of /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches at startup, so one doesn't have to do it manually at every boot.

As root (or with sudo), create a file

/etc/sysctl.d/30-inotify.conf

with the contents

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100001

Reboot, or run "sudo service procps start".


That's it!

Sunday, April 04, 2010

TeXWorks for linux

TeXworks is a nice editor with an emphasis on multilingual use, simplicity and rapid document preview. It is from Jonathan Kew, author of XeTeX.

Binary downloads for Mac and Windows are available from the TeXworks home page. For Ubuntu Linux, there's a PPA here.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

JabRef


Good! The new beta of JabRef, 2.6b3, now has a properly-working interface to JSTOR. One can search by keyword for JSTOR entries, and JabRef lists the hits and lets you import whatever you want to your bibtex database. JabRef even helpfully marks possible duplicates. Very nice indeed, especially for us humanists.

Get your JabRef here: http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

At the moment, JabRef and Mendeley seem to be moving forward fast. They approach the problem of bibliography management slightly differently, and offer different feature-sets. However, both are emerging as seriously useful tools.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Ztree under Ubuntu with Wine

The Gnome launcher for Ztree command line is
wineconsole --backend=user /path/to/Ztree/ZTW.EXE

Thursday, October 22, 2009

... and now iBus

The latest release of Ubuntu, 9.10 Karmic Koala, has just come out and has replaced SCIM altogether with another system called iBus. However, everything seems to work almost identically from the user's point of view, and the tricks I mentioned earlier still make everything work. m17n also works with iBus.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

LaTeX, Unicode, Kile, TeXmaker, Ubuntu Gnome, and SCIM /SKIM

I run Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with the Gnome windows manager. Kile is the most sophisticated LaTeX editor under Linux at present, and TeXmaker is also very good and has the added advantage of being cross-platform.

TeXmaker installs easily with aptitude, but Kile asks for the whole TeXlive distribution to be downloaded as dependencies. This is fine, as far as it goes. But the TeXlive distributed through aptitude is terribly out of date (2007). So it's quite reasonable to get a more recent TeXlive from TUG and install that. But then Kile still wants to install the old 2007 one through aptitude, and everything gets mess. Luckily, it's possible to fool aptitude into thinking that it's TeXlive is already installed. So now you've got Kile and and up-to-date TeXlive. Great, you think.

Until you start trying to type Unicode (you are using XeLaTeX, aren't you?).

Under GNU/Linux, you can use SCIM and the m17n input method, especially the excellent sa-translit and sa-devnag keyboard handlers to enter Unicode roman transliteration or Devanagari very quickly and easily, rapidly swapping keyboards with ctrl-space. It's great.

But Kile and TeXmaker are written using the QT toolkit, like many applications that are written for the KDE environment rather than Gnome. This means that SCIM doesn't immediately work with them. Blast.

Okay, it's deeply buried on the net, but there is an answer to this too, and it works. It's here.

Hooray! Kile, TeXmaker, TeX Live 2008, Ubuntu 9.04, Gnome, SCIM, m17n, all working fine.

I have to say, though, this should all be much easier, and should be done through aptitude.

Footnote:
After installing or uninstalling other language-related stuff in Ubuntu, sometimes iBus stops working. This can be fixed by going to System/Administration/Language Support and making sure keyboard input method is set to "ibus". Sometimes this tool also installs parts of the language support that are missing.

Also, if your writing area still give the ibus message "no input window", it can be aanecessary to right-click your mouse, select "input methods" and set "ibus".