Random facts about computers, operating systems, etc.

 

Pine

In setting up pine, one must set inbox-path in order to receive messages and smtp-server to send messages. On statmech.org, I couldn't send messages when I set smtp-server=mail.statmech.org with pine giving me the error "mail not sent: email client". Turns out, pine wants smtp-server=localhost in this case. Hope this saves you a few hours of frustration.

General Unix/Linux type stuff

  • To use scp, the shell on on the computer you're connecting with must not echo anything to the screen when it is launched. If it does, for example, output a line of text to standard output, then the result of scp is simply this line of text. Have not a clue as to why this is essential. Usage: scp file efeng@zernike:/home/ornstein/efeng copies file from the current computer to my home directory on zernike.
  • For bash shells, it seems to look in .bash_profile before anything else. If you have a .bashrc file in your home directory with aliases and the like, make sure you put source ~/.bashrc in your .bash_profile file.


XDarwin hints on Mac OS X.

  • When you download XDarwin, make sure to grab the files Xquartz.tgz and Xprog.tgz, even those these files are optional. You need Xprog.tgz to build any kind open source software.
  • Just a note about Fink. This is ported from Debian. Everytime you say sudo fink install xapp, you're basically trying to get the application xapp up and running from the source code. This gave me a lot of problems, and it takes forever. If you replace fink with apt-get, then you just attempt to install the binaries, which I find to be infinitely better.
  • After installing XDarwin, you need to run sudo apt-get install system-xfree86 in order to download a package that Fink needs. This assumes that you have already downloaded and installed the XDarwin binaries with XInstall.sh script. This package system-xfree86 acts as a dependency placeholder for Fink, although I'm not exactly sure what that means.
  • Installing tetex and kde with apt-get is pretty easily after doing the previous steps.
  • My favorite aspect of kde is the Kmenu, which allows you to bind keyboard shortcuts to applications. Go to the Control Center -> Desktop -> Panels -> Menus to get the Kmenu. Click on Edit Kmenu to bring up a new window. Then you can put a New Item on there, and put a shortcut key at the bottom. For example, I have xterm -geometry 80x40 -fn 9x15 -e bash bound to Win+E, which is basically the Apple key+E. The less you have to move a mouse, the efficient one will be. Note: still haven't figured out to get bash as my default shell, so this is a quick fix.
  • Another great, great thing about kde is the keyboard shortcuts. Go to Control Center -> Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Shortcuts. You can edit a scheme to get the behavior you want. I had problems getting Apple+Tab to flip to the previous window, so I bound it to Apple+1, which is nearby. The other key bindings that I most frequently use are Apple+O and Apple+P to go forwards and backwards through the Desktops, and Apple+A to maximize/minimize a window.
  • One thing I really like about X Windows is doing latex. I have the following one line perl program, system "xdvi -expert -s 4 -sidemargin 2 $ARGV[0].dvi &"; saved as dvi so the dvi texfile at the command line pops up an xdvi viewer for texfile.dvi just the way I like it. Then I can use Apple-1 to flip back and forth between the tex source and the xdvi output.
  • Backing up research on a lab computer. I use a combination of rsync and ssh to do this. The command is rsync -a -e ssh dirc efeng@zernike:/home/ornstein/efeng/rsh. The -e flag says use ssh instead of rsh. Also, dirc is a directory on my laptop, and a previous version of this directory (or nothing at all) is in /home/ornstein/efeng/rsh. This updates the directory of interest.
  • Mozilla was giving me problems in kde. July 8, 2003.
This page was last updated on July 11, 2003.


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