In a recent KDE upgrade, the katepart text editor, which powers, kwrite, kile and kate, has been modified to open files with long lines as read only. Sometimes it will tell you about this in a warning, sometimes you’ll just notice that you cannot modify the file. It also turns out that the maximum line length is actually very short: 1024 characters. You will have no trouble finding log files with lines longer than this. »
Using pgfplots allows you to quickly create very beautiful plots, that look like they belong to your paper, by automatically using the correct fonts and styles. It does this by using the latex compiler to make the figures. This approach is very powerful but has a major drawback: the latex compiler was not made to do this. As a result, latex tends to run out of memory very fast, and projects with a lot of pgfplots tend to take a long time to compile. »
We didn’t come up with this one, but it’s a very handy reference guide. In good medieval monastery style, we’re copying it here in order to safeguard this information for future generations. »
KDE (and linux) in general has a very elaborate system of guessing the file type of your file, that depends on both the file extension and the file contents. In 99% of the cases these rules work, unfortunately the other 1% has been annoying me for quite some time. »
Getting nice looking formulas in your presentations / posters is always a problem. Latex is great at producing nice looking formulas and text, but for presentations and posters it’s not really equipped. You could however write your formulas in a latex document, then import the pdf into inkscape. »
Some builds of Mendeley had a bug on KDE systems though: you couldn’t open a pdf in an external viewer, which is rather annoying because the internal one is rather limited. »
We wanted to have a code repository that can be browsed from the web. We have chosen to install open source gitorious: http://www.gitorious.org. Unfortunately there are no ready made packages, nor is there an extensive amount of documentation on how to get it running. »
Latex is a very powerful typesetting application. A powerful package to be used with this is pgfplots, which allows you to render your plots using the latex engine. Unfortunately the default latex settings assume you’re running latex on an ancient 20 MHz 486 with less ram than your average mobile phone. This is ok if you’re just asking it to process text, but if you’re using pgfplots it will run out of memory trying to draw your images. »
It’s always a dilemma: latex is great for formulas but well, not so much at making slideshows or posters. Powerpoint on the other hand is great at the latter, but sucks balls at the first. No matter which tool you use to create your powerpoint, a lot of frustration, broken coffee mugs and hairloss ensues. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just typeset formulas in powerpoint using latex? »
The goal is to make a universal bootable usb device with a small boot partition and a data partition on which we’ll store the iso files. This means you can just download almost any bootable iso and boot it without having to burn a cd or unpack the iso. We’ll install grub4dos as boot loader, using the ‘triple mbr’ feature to increase the compatibility with different mainboard and BIOS configurations. We’ll be using command line linux applications to reach our goal, any distro will do. »