Cleverness and Goodness are a rare combination in a person

From the भोजप्रबन्धः बल्लालसेनेन विरचितम् 

मनीषिणः सन्ति न ते हितैषिणो
हितैषिणः सन्ति न ते मनीषिणः |
सुहृच्च विद्वानपि दुर्लभो नृणां |
यथौषधं स्वादु हितञ्च दुर्लभम् ||५८||



Wisdom is knowledge together with goodness. -- S. Wujastyk

Linux Mint swapfile

Getting the swap file working in Linux Mint.  Using LVM

sudo /sbin/mkswap /dev/mapper/foobar [e.g., mint--vg-swap_1]
sudo swapon -a

Brandolini's Law

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Research funding in Canada

Funding sources

• SSHRC (locally pronounced /shirk/).  Like the FWF, NEH or the AHRC.
• Killam Fellowships.  For Canadians.  
• Canadian Institutes of Health Research.  Used to fund medical history, but doesn't now.  But could perhaps be talked to.

See also

• Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes

Canada tops the list of yoga interest worldwide

According to Google's metrics on search trends, the keyword "yoga" is searched for more in Canada than in any other country in the world.  And within Canada, the top "yoga" locations are Vancouver and then Calgary.

GNU Freefont fonts and XeLaTeX

The problem

There's been a long-standing issue about using the Gnu Freefont fonts with XeLaTeX.  The fonts are "Free Serif", "Free Sans" "Free Mono", and each has normal, italic, bold and bold-italic versions.  

These fonts are maintained by Stevan White, who has done a lot of support and maintenance work on them.  

These fonts are of special interest to people who type Indian languages because they include nice, and rather complete Devanāgarī character sets in addition to glyphs for

• Bengali
• Gujarati
• Gurmukhi
• Oriya
• Sinhala
• Tamil
  and
• Malayalam

The Gnu Freefonts are excellent for an exceptionally wide range of scripts and languages, as well as symbols.  See the coverage chart.

At the time of writing this blog, December 2014, the release version of the fonts is 4-beta, dated May 2012.  This is the release that's distributed with TeXLive 2014, and is generally available with other programs that include or require the FreeFonts.

But the 2012 release of the FreeFonts causes problems with the current versions of XeTeX.  Basically, the Devanagari conjunct consonants in the 2012 fonts are incompatible with the current XeTeX compositing engine. (For the technical: Up to TL 2012 XeTeX used ICU; since TL 2013 it's used HarfBuzz.)

In the last couple of years, Stevan has done a great deal of work on the Devanagari parts of the FreeFonts, and he has solved these problems.  But his improvements and developments are only available in the Subversion repository.   For technically-able users, it's not hard to download and compile this pre-release version of the fonts.  But then to make sure that XeTeX calls the right version of the FreeFonts, it's also necessary to weed out the 2012 version of the fonts that's distributed with TeX Live 2014.  And that's a bit hard.  In short, things get fiddly.

Now, Norbert Preining has created a special TeX Live repository for the Subversion version of the FreeFonts.  TeX Live 2014 users can now just invoke that repo and sit back and enjoy the correct Devanagari typesetting.

New warning June 2017: 
the procedure below is no longer supported.  Don't do it.

WARNING
Be warned that the version distributed here is a development version, not meant for production. Expect severe breakage. You need to know what you are doing!
END WARNING

Here follow Norbert's instructions (as of Dec 2014).  Remember to use sudo if you have TeX Live installed system-wide.

The solution. A new TeX Live repository for the pre-release Gnu FreeFonts

Norbert says (Dec 2014):

Here we go: Please do:

tlmgr repository add http://www.tug.org/~preining/tlptexlive/ tlptexlive
tlmgr pinning add tlptexlive gnu-freefont
tlmgr install --reinstall gnu-freefont

You should see something like:  

[~] tlmgr install --reinstall gnu-freefont
...
[1/1, ??:??/??:??] reinstall: gnu-freefont @tlptexlive [12311k]
...

Note the

@tlptexlive

After that you can do  

tlmgr info gnu-freefont

and should see: 

Package installed:   Yes
revision:    3007
sizes:       src: 27157k, doc: 961k, run: 19769k
relocatable: No
collection:  collection-fontsextra

Note the

revision: 3007

which corresponds to the freefont subversion revision!!!

From now on, after the pinning action, updates for gnu-freefont will

always be pulled from tlptexlive (see man page of tlmgr).
 

Reverting the change:

In case you ever want to return to the versions as distributed in TeX Live, please do

tlmgr pinning remove tlptexlive gnu-freefont
tlmgr install --reinstall gun-freefont

Thank you, Norbert!

The complicated history of some editions of Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga

[This is a lightly-revised version of some posts to the INDOLOGY forum sent in November 2014] 


The Visuddhimagga was edited and then published twice in Roman script in the first half of the 20th century.  By Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids for the PTS, published 1920 & 1921, and by Henry Clarke Warren for HOS, posthumously published in 1950.  Neither edition refers to the other. 

Some discussion of these editions is offered by Steve Collins in, "Remarks on the Visuddhimagga, and on its treatment of the Memory of Former Dwelling(s) (pubbenivāsānussatiñāṇa)," Journal of Indian Philosophy (2009), 37:499–532.

Warren met Caroline's husband, the distinguished scholar Thomas Rhys Davids,  in Oxford in 1884, as stated in Lanman's Memorial notes, and was greatly influenced by him.  Warren's work was done long  before that of Caroline Rhys Davids, since Warren died in 1899.  But why wouldn't Dharmananda Kosambi have mentioned Caroline RD's edition in his 1927 preface to Warren's?  It's understandable that Warren's brother Edward wouldn't have known about Caroline RD's edition, when he wrote his pathetic Foreword in 1927, since he was not an indologist.  Why did Warren's edition take 23 years to be printed, even after Kosambi had finished his editing of the MS?  1950 looks like five years after the war, which is understandable.  But that doesn't explain the twelve years of inaction before the war (and after the editing).  Since Warren had paid for the HOS to exist, one would have thought some priority might have been given to publishing his work.

And why didn't Caroline RD mention Warren's work?  Warren had used one of her husband's manuscripts of the VM, so she would surely have had some awareness of Warren's work.  And Thomas Rhys Davids was alive until the end of 1922, and was aware of his wife's work on the VM, since she gave him some pages for checking, some time before the end of 1920 (mentioned in her foreword).  Caroline RD also knew that Warren had published a subject analysis of the VM in the JPTS in 1892, although she appears not to know his article "Buddhaghosa's VM" of the same year, or his "Report of Progress" on his work on the VM, published in 1894.   She mentions Warren in her afterword on p. 767, but only as the author of Buddh. in Tr. (1896), which incidentally contains a 50 passages translated from the VM. 

I would have expected the translator Ñanamoli to say something about all this in his translation, but he doesn't.  He just says he's using both editions.  Perhaps there are book reviews from the later 1920s or 1950s that explain matters, I haven't looked yet.

Has anyone systematically compared the two editions for variants?  Caroline RD's edition is a reproduction of four earlier printed editions, two from Rangoon, two from Ceylon; Warren worked from MSS, two Burmese and two from Ceylon.  All of Warren's MSS came from sources in the UK, so it must have been known in England, and certainly to Thomas RD, that Warren was working on this text.

As mentioned, Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi (not to be confused with his son Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi) worked on Warren's edition of the Visuddhimagga.  Dharmanand's work was finished in 1911, but the book took until 1950 to appear.

Meanwhile, Dharmanand went back to India, and in 1940 he published in Bombay an edition of the Visuddhimagga in his own name, work that he had begun in 1909. It was based on the same manuscripts as Warren's work, plus reference to two printed editions from SE Asia, perhaps the same as those used by Caroline Rhys Davids.  Dharmanand said, in his Preface,

The sources used for the present edition are primarily the same as those employed for the Harvard edition, consisting of four excellent manuscripts: two Burmese, two Singhalese.  In addition, I have used one printed edition in Burmese and one in Siamese Characters ; while generally not so good as the first of the Burmese manuscripts, these contain an occasional superior reading. To reduce the bulk of this volume, I have omitted all variants ; the best alternative readings, however, will be given with my own commentary-in the volume to follow.

Dharmanand's Visuddhimagga edition has been transcribed and published as a web document.

So there are three editions of the Visuddhimagga published between 1920 and 1950, with entangled editorial histories:

1. Caroline Rhys Davids, 1920, based on 4 printed editions
2. Dharmanand Kosambi, 1940, based on 4 MSS and 2 editions
3. Henry Clark Warren, 1950, based on 4 MSS
   Warren died in 1899, leaving his edition almost complete.  Kosambi was invited by Lanman to bring it to a publishable state, which he and Lanman did together, completing that between 1910 and 1911. Nothing then happened for fifteen years.  Then Lanman and Kosambi settled some dispute, and Kosambi saw the work through the press in 1926-1927.  But the work remained unpublished until 1950 [Preface].

Warren's actual editorial work on the text preceded that of both the others.  But it was only published after their editions.

For his 1940 edition, begun in 1909, Kosambi used the same MSS as Warren had used 40 years earlier.  Two of these MSS were personally procured by Warren from England, by correspondence with Thomas Rhys Davids and with Dr Richard Morris [as Lanman says], and a third was personally lent by Henry Rigg.  Did Kosambi really, separately, gain access to the very same privately-owned MSS?  Or were they still in Cambridge MA when he worked  there after Warren's death?  Or did Kosambi use Warren's unpublished text in constituting his own edition.  It is hard to imagine that he would not do so, since the work was done and lay there before him.

I should mention that for all these editors it was a matter of importance that their editions were produced in this or that script.  Caroline Rhys Davids' edition was mainly undertaken in order to produce a Roman-alphabet version of the pre-existing Burmese- and Ceylonese-script editions.  She showed little engagement with actual text-critical tasks.  Warren was engaged with both text-criticism and with the idea of transliteration.  Warren's edition prints MS readings.  Kosambi also cared about script, producing his edition in Devanagari, thus intending specifically to reach a readership in India.  Kosambi also engaged in text-critical tasks to the extent that he applied Paninian grammatical thinking to the construal of the text, especially in matters of sandhi.  But Kosambi omitted to print any variants from the manuscripts, which means that his edition cannot be used as a critical edition, since he denies the reader the opportunity to think critically about his editorial choices and their alternatives.  

The secondary literature contains references to an edition of the Visuddhimagga by Dharmanand Kosambi (and not Warren) published by OUP in London in 1950.  I think this is probably just an error.

Linux Mint 17, Cinnamon, Firefox 31 = freeze

I've been very happy with Linux Mint 17, and the Cinnamon GUI.
Except for the occasional system freezes.  This happened usually when I was swapping between windows (alt+tab), and required a re-login.

I've spent some time looking around the web and trying to diagnose the problem.  I've found one change that seems to have cleared up the problem, and I am not aware that anyone else has mentioned it yet.  I've uninstalled Firefox (31), and replaced it with Google Chrome.  I haven't had a freeze since doing that.  Fingers crossed.

Kuṭipraveśam rasāyanam

In the Compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā), there is a passage describing rejuvenation through the use of Soma, which is taken over a period of four months while living in a special hut (4.29.10).  The description is very dramatic, and I translated it in my book The Roots of Ayurveda.(2003: 125-131).

Two accounts of a parallel therapy occur in Caraka's Compendium (Carakasaṃhitā).  In one version, the patient akes Soma and spends six months naked in a greased barrel (6.1.4-7).  In another, he enters a hut, as in Suśruta's account, but Soma is not involved.  (See Roots, 2003: 76--8.)

In my discussion in Roots, I drew a parallel with the Aitareyabrāhmaṇa 1.3 in which a Soma ritual involving rebirth is described (the passage was kindly pointed out to me by David Pingree).

Now I have identified another passage that seems to be about the same ritual.

Pātañjalayogaśāstra (sūtras and bhāṣya)

In the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (i.e., the Yoga Sutras and the Bhāṣya commentary, all by Patañjali), there is a sutra that lists the means by which super powers may be attained.  Sutra 4.1 says:

super powers (siddhi) come from birth, drugs, mantras, asceticism, and meditative integration (samādhi)(janmauṣadhimantratapaḥsamādhijāḥ siddhayaḥ).  

Explaining this, Patañjali (not Vyāsa) says, in his Bhāṣya,

by using drugs means using rejuvenations (rasāyana) in the houses of the Asuras, and so on.
(oṣadhibhir asurabhavaneṣu rasāyanenety evamādiḥ).

No further explanation is given, and we are left to wonder what the "houses of the Asuras" might be.

Śaṅkara

The commentator Śaṅkara, in his Vivaraṇa, expands on this passage in a significant way. He says (1952 edition, pp. 317-18):

oṣadhibhir asurabhavaneṣu rasāyanena  somāmalakādibhakṣaṇena pūrvadehānapanayenaiva/

by means of drugs in the houses of the Asuras by elixir, by consuming Soma, emblic, and so on, completely without the removal of the previous body.   

[I am grateful to Philipp Maas for improving this translation. -- October 2016]

The use of the word "soma" suggests that this commentator is putting together the idea of rasāyana entioned in the Bhāṣya with the specific rasāyana treatment described by Suśruta (and, more briefly, Caraka).

Asurabhavana

The only place that Asurabhavana "home of the Asuras" is mentioned with any regularity is in the Pāli literature of the Buddhist Canon.  For example, in the Mahā Suññata Sutta (Majjhimanikāya 122/3, tr. by Piya Tan; tr. by Thanissaro Bhikkhu), the Buddha is described worrying about the fact that worldly people live in too-crowded conditions for proper meditation.  Asura bhavana is described as being ten-thousand yojanas wide, and is included in a listing of the various parts of the universe where living creatures live (and are crowded).  Asurabhavana is therefore a geographical location in the Buddhist universe.

In one of the British Library Stein Tibetan manuscripts, IOL Tib J 644, Vajrapāṇi is described entering an Asura Cave in order to meditate.  See J. Dalton and Sam van Schaik (2006), Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library. Brill, Leiden, Boston, p. 291.

Vācaspatimiśra

Explaining Patañjali, the commentator Vācaspati (as so often) is guessing at the meaning on the basis of his general knowledge (e-edition at SARIT): 

oṣadhisiddhim āha --- asurabhavaneṣv iti/ manuṣyo hi kutaś cin nimittād asurabhavanam upasaṃprāptaḥ kamanīyābhir asurakanyābhir upanītaṃ rasāyanam upayujyājarāmaraṇatvam anyāś ca siddhīr āsādayati/ ihaiva vā rasāyanopayogena yathā māṇḍavyo munī rasopayogād vindhyavāsīti/

He states the super power of drugs: "in the houses of the Asuras." Because a human, for a certain reason, who has reached the house of an Asura, is served an elixir by the attractive Asura girls.  After taking it, he achieves the state of never aging or dying, and other super powers.  Alternatively, by taking elixirs in this actual world, like the sage Māṇḍavya took up residence in the Vindhya mountains through the use of elixirs.

Sanskrit Vidh - On alchemical transubstantiation versus piercing

[This reproduces a post by me to the INDOLOGY list, earlier today]

I am trying to firm up the idea that vedh- means convert, transmute, or (for the philosophers among us, perhaps) transubstantiate.

The Rasaratnasamuccaya is a kind of late-ish nibandha text that brings together, organizes and medicalizes the earlier, more tantric alchemical literature.  Meulenbeld argued that it is datable to the sixteenth century (HIML IIA 670).  Earliest dated MS: 1699 CE.  This text is not bad as a representative of the developed ("classical"?) rasaśāstra tradition; one would expect less standardization of vocab. in earlier texts.
At Rasaratnasamuccaya 8.94-95 there is a definition of śabdavedha. 

from blowing of iron, with mercury in the mouth, there is the creation of goldenness and silverness. That is known as Word-vedha.

and the commentator makes it even more explicit that this is transmutation, using pari-ṇam.  Rasaratnasamuccayabodhinī on 8.95:

... tat lauhakhaṇḍaṃ svarṇādirūpeṇa pariṇatam//
that bit of iron is converted into the form of gold etc.

... yatra vedhe svarṇādirūpeṇa pariṇamet sa śabdavedha ity arthaḥ//

Word-vedha is where it converts with the form of gold etc. ...

 

The operation being described here is not unclear.  The alchemist puts a piece of mercury in his mouth and blows on a piece of iron.  It becomes golden or silvery.  This "becoming" is "vedha."

The Bodhinī authors were Āśubodha and Nityabodha (hence the witty title), the sons of Jīvānanda Vidyāsāgara Bhaṭṭacārya, and the Bodhinī was published in Calcutta in 1927.  So it's arguable that their interpretation was influenced by nineteenth-twentieth century thought.  However, their commentary is very śāstric and elaborate (note the Pāṇinian grammatical parsing, "dhama dhāvane ity asmāt lyuḥ" (>P.1.3.134 and pacādi ākṛtigaṇa).  And as Meulenbeld points out, they cite an exceptionally wide range of earlier rasaśāstra texts (HIML IIA 671-2).  Their interpretations are based on a close reading of classical rasaśāstra literature.  At the very least, one can say that their view represents the understanding of learned panditas in turn of the century Calcutta, that vedha meant pariṇāma, or transmutation. 

What this leaves unexplained is whether this is a different IE root than vedh "split, pierce."

The Origins of a Famous Yogic/Tantric Image (part 2)

In a post in February this year I talked about the origin and spread of the famous "lines of energy" image.  I asserted that this image was created by or for Yogini Sunita.

I had a memory of having seen the image reproduced in Mircea Eliade's book, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, or in one of Daniélou's books.  I looked at the issues of Eliade's books available to me, and at Daniélou's
Yoga: Mastering the Secrets of Matter and the Universe, that is on my bookshelf, but the image wasn't there.

Now, I can report that I've solved both these puzzles in a stroke.  In the Vienna Indology library last week, I came across an Eliade book that I'd forgotten, Patanjali et le Yoga (Paris, 1962).  And look at the cover!

Eliade reproduces the image inside the book:

Eliade captions the image "La matière, la vie, l'esprit."  As an aside, I have argued and taught in the past that anyone who says "body, mind and spirit" is reproducing a meme from Western New Age thought, and not anything specifically Indian.  The threefold division of Man in the original Sanskrit sources is normally "body, mind and speech."

In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, Eliade attributes this image to Alain Daniélou's "Yoga: Méthode de réintégration (Éditions de l'Arche), pp. 171, 179 et couverture."  Eliade doesn't give a date for the Daniélou edition he copied from, but the edition will turn up sooner or later.  It was first published in 1951.

From http://www.pranayama-yoga.co.uk/

So, this image was used by Daniélou, as early as 1951, and following him, by Eliade in 1962.

The earliest edition of Yogini Sunita's book that I can find is 1965, and she only arrived in England in 1960, and started her first yoga classes that year, as reported in this newspaper clip.

So perhaps the whole story of this image has a prehistory before Yogini Sunita.  Perhaps she reproduced the image from Daniélou, or even Eliade.

Update April 2019

Here's the image in a 1949 English translation of Daniélou's book.  The caption says "with permission from 'Kalyan' Corakhour".  Kalyan was a well-known Sanskrit and Hindi journal published by the Geeta Press in Gorakhpur since 1926.  So the trail now leads to an issue of Kalyan from before 1949.  Some issues have been scanned and are at Archive.org.

Update January 2022

Found it!  After an afternoon of scanning back issues of Kalyan, I located the image in the 1935 issue: 

Unfortunately, the image available in the scan is folded over, so the whole image is not visible.  But the visible parts are definitely identifiable as the bottom half of the famous Danielou-Eliade-Sunita image. It's nice to see that it is in negative, which explains why it was negative in the early reproductions.  This is a bold idea by the Kalyan illustrator.  Later printers have preferred to reverse the image to positive.  In the volume, the illustration is on page 560 and illustrates an article by Svāmī Śrīkṛṣṇacalled "प्राणायामविषयको मेरा अनुभव"(My experience in the area of Prāṇāyāma") (pp. 554-561). 

This issue of Kalyan was dedicated to the theme of Yoga, which is no doubt why it came to Danielou's attention, over ten years later.  It contains other interesting illustrations, including pictures on pp. 389-392 copied without attribution from Haṃsasvarūpa's Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa (Muzaffarpur, Bihar: Trikutivilas Press, 1903?).  See Wujastyk 2009: 201-204 for further background on this work 

In the same issue of Kalyan, there is an unexpected article on mesmerism and hypnotism by Dr Durgāśaṅkarajī Nāgara, "मेस्मेरिज्म् और् हिप्नाटिज्म्" (pp. 538-544) that gives a history of the techniques, its use at St Thomas's hospital in London, illustrations of magnets and practitioners, and a discussion of electrical flow, the scientific basis, methods of magnetic pass, deep breathing, etc.

 

Open letter to MLBD about their publishing Mein Kampf

Update, 21 May 2014
Motilal Banarsidass responded graciously, rapidly and positively to this letter and the petition, and agreed to stop distributing the book.

Notes on the Ukrainian crisis

The Nuland-Pyatt recording

[The following is an extract, authored by me, from the WikiPedia page on this topic.  My text has been deleted four or five times by someone with a Russian-sounding name, NazariyKaminski, or by a now-deleted user called RedPenOfDeath and other sock-puppets.  So I am placing the text here, for the record.]

The Origins of a Famous Yogic/Tantric Image (part 1)

Mark Singleton

Ellen Goldberg

I'm delighted by the arrival from the bookshop of my copy of the excellent new book Gurus of Modern Yoga edited by Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (ISBN 978-0-19-993872-8).

Full details of the book can be had from Peter Wyzlic's indologica.de website.





Yogini Sunita's Pranayama Image

Suzanne Newcombe

Suzanne Newcombe's chapter, "The Institutionalization of the Yoga Tradition: `Gurus' B. K. S. Iyengar and Yogini Sunita in Britain," is an outstanding description and evaluation of the impact of two yoga teachers in the UK.  One of Suzanne's subjects is Yogini Sunita (aka Bernadette Cabral), originally a Catholic from Bombay.  Although tragically killed by a car at the early age of 38, her work is kept alive by her son Kenneth Cabral and other yoga teachers (http://www.pranayama-yoga.co.uk).

Yogini Sunita published a book in 1965 called Pranayama, The Art of

Relaxation, The Lotus and the Rose (Worldcat).  It contained an illustration that has gone on to become one of the most famous and iconic images in yoga publishing.  The image is a line drawing in black on a white background showing the outline of a seated, cross-legged meditator superimposed on a wild network of lines, with annotations in Devanagari script. The Sanskrit word प्राणायाम (prāṇāyāma) "breath control" labels the image in the top right-hand corner.  The smaller writing, along the lines, is more or less illegible in all the reproductions I have been able to examine.  I can just discern the Devanagari alphabet being spelt out (अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ओ ऐ औ अं अः ...) on the right clavicle.  But the rest of the writing is unclear.  I am not confident that it is even real text, although it looks superficially like Devanagari or Gujarati script.  Only an examination of the original artwork or a good reproduction would settle the matter.

Yogini Sunita's signature

Yogini Sunita was not a confident Devanagari writer, as is evidenced by her signature in the preface to her book (in Devanagari, "yodinī saunīṭā").  She could not have produced the Pranayama the drawing herself, and must have commissioned it from a source or collaborator with a confident knowledge of Sanskrit and the Devanagari script, perhaps in Bombay.

Yogini Sunita's illustration has been reproduced almost endlessly in books and now on the internet, and there are multiple modifications and interpretations.  One of the more common is a negative version, with white lines on a black background.  Others are coloured, simplified, and interpreted in various creative ways.  It appears in various contemporary yoga-themed mashups.  The word प्राणायाम is often masked out.  The image is often shown as a representation not primarily of breath control, but of the nodes and tubes of the spiritual body (cakras and nāḍīs).

Suzanne Newcombe describes how Yogini Sunita's early death meant that her methods and ideas did not spread as widely as those of other 20th century yoga teachers.  Nevertheless, the Pranayama illustration from her 1965 book has become one of the most widely-known images of yoga in the 21st-century (Google images).

Update, July 2014: now see part 2 of this article

How To Fix A Non-Bootable Ubuntu System Due To Broken Updates Using A LiveCD And Chroot

----
How To Fix A Non-Bootable Ubuntu System Due To Broken Updates Using A LiveCD And Chroot
// Web Upd8 - Ubuntu / Linux blog

If your Ubuntu system doesn't boot because of some broken updates and the bug was fixed in the repositories, you can use an Ubuntu Live CD and chroot to update the system and fix it.

1. Create a bootable Ubuntu CD/DVD or USB stick, boot from it and select "Try Ubuntu without installing". Once you get to the Ubuntu desktop, open a terminal.

2. You need to find out your root partition on your Ubuntu installation. On a standard Ubuntu installation, the root partition is "/dev/sda1", but it may be different for you. To figure out what's the root partition, run the following command:

sudo fdisk -l

This will display a list of hard disks and partitions from which you'll have to figure out which one is the root partition.

To make sure a certain partition is the root partition, you can mount it (first command under step 3), browse it using a file manager and make sure it contains folders that you'd normally find in a root partition, such as "sys", "proc", "run" and "dev".

3. Now let's mount the root partition along with the /sys, /proc, /run and /dev partitions and enter chroot:
sudo mount ROOT-PARTITION /mnt
for i in /sys /proc /run /dev; do sudo mount --bind "$i" "/mnt$i"; done
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/
sudo chroot /mnt
Notes:
ROOT-PARTITION is the root partition, for example /dev/sda1 in my case - see step 2;the command that copies resolv.conf gets the network working, at least for me (using DHCP); if you get an error about resolv.conf being identical when copying it, just ignore it.
Now you can update the system - in the same terminal, type:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Since you've chrooted into your Ubuntu installation, the changes you make affect it and not the Live CD, obviously.

If the bug that caused your system not to boot is happening because of some package in the Proposed repositories, the steps above are useful, but you'll also have to know how to downgrade the packages from the proposed repository - for how to do that, see: How To Downgrade Proposed Repository Packages In Ubuntu

Refrences: 1, 2, 3

Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

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Fwd: Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Date: 18 January 2014 21:58
Subject: Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool
To: Philipp André Maas <Philipp.A.Maas@gmail.com>, Alessandro Graheli <a.graheli@gmail.com>, Karin Preisendanz <karin.preisendanz@univie.ac.at>, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk.cikitsa@blogspot.com>

Some interesting reflections on Juxta...

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Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool
// Juxta

I have had the opportunity to use Juxta Commons for several editorial projects, and while taking a breath between a Juxta-intensive term project last semester and my Juxta-intensive MA thesis this semester, I would like to offer a few thoughts on Juxta as an editorial tool.

For my term project for Jerome McGann's American Historiography class last semester, I conducted a collation of Martin R. Delany's novel, Blake, or, The Huts of America, one of the earliest African American novels published in the United States.Little did I know that my exploration would conduct me into an adventure as much technological as textual, but when Professor McGann recommended I use Juxta for conducting the collation and displaying the results, that is exactly what happened. I input my texts into Juxta Commons, collated them, and produced HTML texts of the individual chapters, each with an apparatus of textual variants, using Juxta's Edition Starter. I linked these HTML files together into an easily navigable website to present the results to Professor McGann. I'll be posting on the intriguing results themselves next week, but in the meantime, they can also be viewed on the website I constructed, hosted by GitHub: Blake Project home.

Juxta helped me enormously in this project. First, it was incredibly useful in helping me clean up my texts. My collation involved an 1859 serialization of the novel, and another serialization in 1861-62. The first, I was able to digitize using OCR; the second, I had to transcribe myself. Anyone who has done OCR work knows that every minute of scanning leads to (in my case) an average of five or ten minutes of cleaning up OCR errors. I also had my own transcription errors to catch and correct. By checking Juxta's highlighted variants, I was able to—relatively quickly—fix the errors and produce reliable texts. Secondly, once collated, I had the results stored in Juxta Commons; I did not have to write down in a collation chart every variant to avoid losing that information, as I would if I were machine- or sight-collating. Juxta's heat-map display allows the editor to see variants in-line, as well, which saves an immense amount of time when it comes to analyzing results: you do not have to reference page and line numbers to see the context of the variants. Lastly, Juxta enabled me to organize a large amount of text in individual collation sets—one for each chapter. I was able to jump between chapters and view their variants easily.

As helpful as Juxta was, however, I caution all those new to digital collation that no tool can perfectly collate or create an apparatus from an imperfect text. In this respect, there is still no replacement for human discretion—which is, ultimately, a good thing. For instance, while the Juxta user can turn off punctuation variants in the display, if the user does want punctuation and the punctuation is not spaced exactly the same in both witnesses, the program highlights this anomalous spacing. Thus, when 59 reads

' Henry, wat…

and 61 reads

'Henry, wat…

Juxta will show that punctuation spacing as a variant, while the human editor knows it is the result of typesetting idiosyncrasies rather than a meaningful variant. Such variants can carry over into the Juxta Edition Builder, as well, resulting in meaningless apparatus entries. For these reasons, you must make your texts perfect to get a perfect Juxta heat map and especially before using Edition Starter; otherwise, you'll need to fix the spacing in Juxta and output another apparatus, or edit the text or HTML files to remove undesirable entries.

Spacing issues can also result in disjointed apparatus entries, as occurred in my apparatus for Chapter XI in the case of the contraction needn't. Notice how because of the spacing in needn t and need nt, Juxta recognized the two parts of the contraction as two separate variants (lines 130 and 131):

This one variant was broken into two apparatus entries because Juxta recognized it as two words. There is really no way of rectifying this problem except by checking and editing the text and HTML apparatuses after the fact.

I mean simply to caution scholars going into this sort of work so that they can better estimate the time required for digital collation. This being my first major digital collation project, I averaged about two hours per chapter (chapters ranging between 1000 and 4000 words each) to transcribe the 61-62 text and then collate both witnesses in Juxta. I then needed an extra one or two hours per chapter to correct OCR and transcription errors.

While it did take me time to clean up the digital texts so that Juxta could do its job most efficiently, in the end, Juxta certainly saved me time—time I would have spent keeping collation records, constructing an apparatus, and creating the HTML files (as I wanted to do a digital presentation). I would be remiss, however, if I did not recommend a few improvements and future directions.

As useful as Juxta is, it nevertheless has limitations. One difficulty I had while cleaning my texts was that I could not correct them while viewing the collation sets; I had, rather, to open the witnesses in separate windows.

The ability to edit the witnesses in the collation set directly would make correction of digitization errors much easier. This is not a serious impediment, though, and is easily dealt with in the manner I mentioned. The Juxta download does allow this in a limited capacity: the user can open a witness in the "Source" field below the collation visualization, then click "Edit" to enable editing in that screen. However, while the editing capability is turned on for the "Source," you cannot scroll in the visualization—and so navigate to the next error which may need to be corrected.

A more important limitation is the fact that the Edition Starter does not allow for the creation of eclectic texts, texts constructed with readings from multiple witnesses; rather, the user can only select one witness as the "base text," and all readings in the edition are from that base text.

Most scholarly editors, however, likely will need to adopt readings from different witnesses at some point in the preparation of their editions. Juxta's developers need to mastermind a way of selecting which reading to adopt per variant; selected readings would then be adopted in the text in Edition Starter. For the sake of visualizing, I did some screenshot melding in Paint of what this function might look like:

Currently, an editor wishing to use the Edition Starter to construct an edition would need to select either the copy-text or the text with the most adopted readings for the base text. The editor would then need to adopt readings from other witnesses by editing the the output DOCX or HTML files. I do not know the intricacies of the code which runs Juxta. I looked at it on GitHub, but, alas! my very elementary coding knowledge was completely inadequate to the task. I intend to delve more as my expertise improves, and in the meantime, I encourage all the truly code-savvy scholars out there to look at the code and consider this problem. In my opinion, this is the one hurdle which, once overcome, would make Juxta the optimal choice as an edition-preparation tool—not just a collation tool. Another feature which would be fantastic to include eventually would be a way of digitally categorizing variants: accidental versus substantive; printer errors, editor corrections, or author revisions; etc. Then, an option to adopt all substantives from text A, for instance, would—perhaps—leave nothing to be desired by the digitally inclined textual editor. I am excited about Juxta. I am amazed by what it can do and exhilarated by what it may yet be capable of, and taking its limitations with its vast benefits, I will continue to use it for all future editorial projects.

Stephanie Kingsley is a second-year English MA student specializing in 19th-century American literature, textual studies, and digital humanities. She is one of this year's Praxis Fellows [see Praxis blogs] and Rare Book School Fellows. For more information, visit http://stephanie-kingsley.github.io/, and remember to watch for Ms. Kingsley's post next week on the results of her collation of Delany's Blake.

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Dominik Wujastyk, from Android phone.

Zooniverse and Intelligent Machine-assisted Semantic Tagging of Manuscripts

I'm very impressed by the technology being used in the War Diaries Project.  To see what I mean, click on "Get Started" and try the guided tutorial.

Once there's a critical mass of digitized Sanskrit manuscripts available, I think it would be very interesting to contact the people at Zooniverse and discuss the possiblility of a Sanskrit MS-tagging project, like the War Diaries.

Tools for cataloguing Sanskrit manuscripts, no.1

In the post-office today I saw this piece of board that's used as a size-template to quickly assess which envelope to choose.  This is a formalized version of the same tool that I used for the many years that I spent cataloguing and packing Sanskrit manuscripts at the Wellcome Library in London.  I made a piece of board with three main size-outlines, for MSS of α, β, γ sizes.  Anything larger than γ counted as δ.  Palm-leaf MSS were all ε.

It was nice to see the same tool being used for a similar job, in an Austrian post-office!

Corrupted font spacing in terminal

I had this problem, that was solved by purging pango-graphite:

sudo apt-get purge pango-graphite

From Gnome to Cinnamon

Gnome 2 and 3

Ubuntu with Gnome 2

Ubuntu with Unity

After moving to Ubuntu GNU/Linux for all my work, in 2009, I used the default interface, Gnome 2, for a while.  Later, with version 3, Gnome moved to a completely new concept, but Ubuntu forked the development and moved to Unity, so I did that too.  

Gnome 3

Gnome 2 and Unity both had their virtues and their flaws.  The six-monthly upgrade cycle ("cadence") was never as smooth as it should be, so there have often been niggles that lasted a few weeks or months.  I didn't like Unity's two different search boxes.

Ubuntu with Gnome 3

I started using the Gnome Shell, ver. 3, on Linux (Ubuntu) after seeing my friends and colleagues using it at the TeX conference in Trivandrum in 2011.  I really liked Gnome 3, but with the update from 3.6 to 3.8 and 3.10, they did some major, major things wrong, and I've finally dumped it, in favour of Cinnamon.

The biggest boo-boo in the development of Gnome from version 3.8, was fooling with the default file-manager, Nautilus.  Many people have complained about the stripping out of function, like split-screen, and that was bad enough.  So was the nonsense about shifting the menus to the panel bar (or not!).  But what hasn't got mentioned so much (at all?) is that the new Nautilus changed all the keyboard shortcuts and rearranged the shortcuts relating to the menu system.  So Alt-F didn't bring up a "File" menu any more, for  example.  Right mouse-click+R didn't begin renaming a file.  If one uses computers all day, then one's fingers get trained, and no interface designer should mess with that stuff without expecting backlash.  With Nautilus 3.8, it was like being a beginning typist again, looking at my fingers, chicken-pecking for keys.

I liked the general design model of Gnome 3, with the corner switch to the meta level for choosing programs, desktops, and so on.  Searching for lesser-used programs with a few keystrokes rather than poking hopelessly through nested menus.  Much better.  A genuine and valuable contribution to the vision of how a computer should work.

Thanks to Webupd8, I was able to work around the Nautilus problem by uninstalling it and using Nemo instead.

But things just kept going wrong.  The shell crashed too often.  On two of my machines it stopped coming up at login, and had to be started manually.  Only after a couple of weeks did I track this down to a bad file in ~/.config/gnome-session (and I'm still not 100% sure).  Frequent crashes of the gnome-control-panel and other utilities.  More and more extraordinary tweaking to make it comfortable and useable.  Finally, I've had enough.

 

Cinnamon

Ubuntu with Cinnamon

I'm in my first few days of using Cinnamon, and so far things are okay.  I'm running Cinnamon on top of Ubuntu.  It's like stepping back in time, a bit, all those menus.  But one doesn't have to use them, and with a bit of tweaking one can set things up so that actual shell behaviour is very similar to Gnome 3.6.  Nemo is there - what a relief.  Alacarte actually works, but I've dumped it in favour of Menulibre in any case.  Configuration and tweaking is much nicer.  Many useful add-ons, and although I liked the http://extensions.gnome.org system, Cinnamon handles the add-on business in a much more integrated way.  Ibus+m17n work as expected again.  In general, it's an update from Gnome 2 in the direction of Gnome 3 but not the whole way.  And it seems more stable, which is critical to getting work done.