February 10, 2008

Got a new machine – CF-R7

Last week I got a new notebook. First I was thinking of getting the Panasonic CF-R6 but later I realized that 2GB of memory can be very fine so I decided to get a new one and so I chose the CF-R7 which comes with 1GB memory a 80GB HDD and a Intel core2duo processor. It came in a very small package.

The first thing I realized is, that they added a small fan on the back. I was not that happy at first, but I realized by the time that it is very silent.
Since I am no Vista user I installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.

Everything worked quite out of the box even the sdhc card reader in the front. The only thing which is not working is the feature to change the display brightness with the hotkeys. I tried everything sofar but no luck at all.

After some days of working with it I can say that I am very happy with this machine. Its small, fast, light, not easy to break and runs quite long on the battery.

January 1, 2008

Network Manager Causing High Load

Sometimes when I wake up my Ubuntu laptop from suspend mode, it is the case that the Network Manager is having 100% load. I can’t connect to any network, so nothing is working. If you restarted your computer at this point and also get in the checking hdd routine, then your are in bad mood, well at least I was.

A solution I am using is, simply kill the process and restart it again. How to do this?
Just run the two following commands.

sudo killall -9 NetworkManager
sudo /etc/dbus-1/event.d/25NetworkManager start

After a short time the Network Manager starts searching for the Network connection and you are ready to roll.

December 16, 2007

Using Platex For Writing Japanese In Ubuntu

The task was to make it possible to write a document in Japanese Language and compile it with platex.

First there are some packages you need to install. I don’t really know if you need anthy to be setup at this point, but it was already setup on my machine.

Get:

% sudo apt-get install ptex-bin ptex-base okumura-clsfiles
% sudo apt-get install ptex-base ptex-bin ptex-jisfonts
% sudo apt-get install xdvik-ja dvipsk-ja dvi2ps gv gnome-gv
% sudo apt-get install jbibtex-bin jmpost mendexk
% sudo apt-get install okumura-clsfiles vfdata-morisawa5 dvi2ps-fontdesc-morisawa5
% sudo jisftconfig add

After that you can fire up emacs. Go to Options->MULE and set Language Environment to Japanese.
Now you can just start writing the document. To start withI suggest using jarticle as the documentclass.

When you are done with it run platex yourfile.tex and if you are not getting any missing font errors your are nearly done with everything. The next step is to view the *.dvi file. For that use xdvi-ja yourfile.dvi and everything should show up correctly.

Leave me a comment if problems occur.

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