This entry’s title is almost longer than the entry itself. Just wanted to get one more in before we hit December.
This is a handy little collection of Photoshop plugins that will allow you to manipulate Mac Paint, Paint Shop Pro 7 and .ICO files. Most seem to be donation-ware and open source.
My quest to ease LaTeX composition continues, and this time I had help from an unexpected source: a student. He pointed me to jpicedt, an amazing little program that writes clean LaTeX code of drawings and figures, all while presenting the user with a WYSIWYG interface. It also supports stylized text, shading and a full palette of color. Prior to this, I would have had to direct users to an external program to create simple drawings and have them import them as images. This exploits the true power of LaTeX by utilizing the code’s ability to display graphics natively. And it falls into my favorite category of software: cross-platform. Its written in Java and so far I’ve successfully installed it on Mac and Linux for my users. I suspect no problems on the Windows side either.
This is an interesting take on rsync utilized for the purpose of incremental backups. I can’t help but wonder about the drawbacks of utilizing Samba as the author cites as an example, but at the same time it is a compelling idea for a home-grown system of backup. In this setup, I suppose you would have to be prepared to lose Mac metadata, but its a small price to pay if you ask me. Rather than use Samba, I wonder if the author thought to install SSH-server on his client PCs via Cygwin to treat them like his Linux boxes. Seems as though it would make things easier when it comes to authentication. Instead of installing a PAM module to handle Samba mounts, SSH-Agent could be employed to fire off logins.
This sort of backup server method requires no client on the desktop machine (other than SSH which comes with Linux/Mac, or Samba which talks to Windows shares). Since this utilizes a pull method, all error logs would exist on the server, and failure to backup could be emailed to the local administrator. I might try this for a limited set of my own departmental machines to see how it works out. Take a look for yourself…
I saw something rarely seen in a cross-platform environment today: my shared printing solution “just worked”. I had a Mac desktop with a printer and a Linux (my Fedora tester) workstation without a place to print. I instructed the Mac user to click on System Preferences and Sharing and to click on the check box next to Printer Sharing. I then told the Linux user to click on File and Print in Mozilla. The shared Mac printer was there without any more intervention, I kid you not.
Got to love that CUPS printing. Wee!
Printer memory is more often than not a problem for me, whatever the platform. Whether its local printer memory, OIT queues overloading, or low allocation of memory for local mail spools the problem is always the same. Someone sends through a 100 page postscript, 25 pages come out - then nothing. Here’s one method of troubleshooting that I’m always neglecting to try, applicable to WinXP and 2k. Maybe its time to resurrect that local print server I took down oh so long ago.
“To print the current document, you must allocate more memory for the printer or send smaller print jobs.
To configure PostScript memory, in the Printer Properties dialog box, on the Device Settings tab, modify Available PostScript Memory. You must have Manage printer rights to change Available PostScript Memory.”
Oh and yea, here’s the answer that I’ll typically give (and that always works) that for some reason no one likes to hear:
“Break large print jobs into smaller parts to reduce the amount of printer memory required. For example, a ten-page print job can be divided into two five-page jobs.”
Although the new Departmental Contact field seemed like it would be useful at first, this addition to the Hostmaster entry template hasn’t solved one of the most persistent problems for entry management my departments have experienced. The problem is that often records associated with my departments have account numbers that are not our own. This is a problem because while the account will be generally managed by its financial contact, for the records that fall into our department my department manager needs to have those financial contact powers. Our managers just need to be able to edit the entries that have both our department and account numbers attached to them. So in this instance, by managerial request, I am making managers the technical contact as well. I do not see another solution immediately available and the power to edit those entries is a pressing need. At least this way they will be able to edit the record and need only suffer a bit through the technically-related mailings.
I liked this Fedora 10 Commandments posted as part of a Linux thread over at ars.
“THE TEN COMMANDMENTS for Newbies and Fedora. (Subject to tweakage and flames of course)
1) Thou shall NOT download individual RPMs from 3rd party sources and try to install them on Fedora. In fact, forget the rpm command exists, just use yum. Thy Lord does not care that the person puts “for Fedora!” on the web page, thou shall get thy packages from Fedora only. Breaking this commandment will destroy your soul. You have been warned.
2) Thou shall NOT mix Fedora and non-Fedora repositories like DAG and freshrpms. Bad things happen.
3) Thou shall NOT use the 2.6 repository unless you know what you are doing.
4) Thou shall use the netinstall CD instead of downloading 5 discs of things you will never use. (link on release day)
5) Thou shall install the “kernel-headers” or “kernel-source” package that corresponds to your kernel, so your Nvidia drivers will install. (Just pick them on install, it’s under “Kernel Development”.
6) Thou shall look in your “Systems Tool” menu before asking an “expert” for advice. Most of the things are in the gui, including networking tools, so if you need to add a DNS server, add it in the tool, it’s omg easy, so easy in fact that many seasoned users will inadvertantly tell you the hard way. “Dude just vi /etc/resolv.conf add the nameserver and :wq!”
7) Experts, thou shall abide by Commandment Number 6. Think twice before replying “Recompile your kernel” or “Mangle your XF86Config”. On every box I have installed Fedora on you don’t even do an X config, it just works, and can resize resolution on-the-fly. Those of you chortling because you had to do it in Slackware 95 and install from 58 floppies remember that no one was born an expert, and we’d rather have people learning Linux with a good system out of the box than giving up.
Thou shall know thy hardware AND REFER TO THE RELEASE NOTES. Just in case.
9) Thou shall know thy redhat-config-* tools. In the CLI, all redhat config tools start with “redhat-config” so, type that and hit tab twice. There’s your list of tools. Look there if you don’t find it in your “System Tools”. Note that for 95% of your system config this is fine, so remember that before you listen to some guy on some godforsaken IRC channel telling you to recompile your libc6.
10) Thou shall add the Fedora yum sources from this thread, for the Lord wisheth DVD and MP3 unto his minions.
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mod-edit:
per request, get Fedora from this link:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/images/boot.iso”
And while we’re quoting Fedora discussions, here’s an unofficial FAQ that’s really helpful until the community resources coallesce.
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