| Background Processors
(3 Aug 1998) (Last Updated: 25 July 2003) |
The Linux boxes named bg1, bg2, bg3, bg4 and bg5 are full-fledged
departmental Linux systems. Each has dual Pentium IV Xeon
processors (hyperthreaded).
and 1.8 GB of swap space.
bg1, bg2 and bg3 have 3.06GHz processors and 2GB RAM. bg4 and bg5 have 2.4GHz processors and 1GB RAM.
|
| LaTeX to
PDF
(20 November 2000) |
The easiest way to produce good PDF output for LaTeX is to follow
the following steps:
The more you use conventional fonts, the more likely the above process is to produce good PDF. |
| CD Burner
(17 October 2000) |
We have installed a fast CD-RW burner on saranac, one of the systems
in the MS121 lab. Hopefully, this will let people move files from
departmental disks onto CDs.
Users who want access to saranac in order to burn CDs have priority over normal users (i.e., those not burning a CD). |
| Printing
from exmh
(and gv and acroread) (17 Sep 1997) (Last updated: 19 Feb 1999) |
A common problem while running exmh in Linux is printing. When trying
to print from within exmh you may receive the following error message:
You have exceeded the argument length ...Exiting The error is due to the fact that lpr is wrappered to prevent buffer overflow. The lpr wrapper returns the above error message when the length of the filename to be printed is greater than some maximum. The maximums have been set to restrict buffer overflow. Exmh normally provides lpr with the full path to the filename to be printed. Because of the way we mount the Linux filesystems these path names could become very long. So you get the above message. If you are having the above problem, please do the following.
This is also useful in other tools which expect you to supply a printing command. gv and acroread are prime instances of such tools. To select exmh-lpr as your default print command in gv, go to the State/Setup Options menu and set the print command to exmh-lpr.
To select exmh-lpr as your default print command in acroread, put
the following in your ~/.Xdefaults
|
| Printing
PDF Files in Acroread
(28 Sep 1998) |
In order to correctly print pdf files from acroread, the "Download Fonts Once" option found under File | Print must be disabled. Font problems occur after the first printed page when this option is enabled. |
| Color
Laser Printer
(26 Jan 1998) |
An HP Color LaserJet 5M has been installed in the main departmental office.
This is a big-time printer with a 30,000 page/month duty cycle. According to
HP, a typical black and white page costs $0.02, and a typical color page costs
about $0.12.
Access to this printer has been enabled from all departmental Sparcs and Linux systems. Faculty have unrestricted access. Students have no default access. A faculty member can request a temporary page allocation for a student by sending email to the techie alias.
Dvips cannot send output to the printer directly. Here's the recommended way to
send a TeX/LaTeX document with color to the printer:
Please talk to a techie directly to create transparencies on this
printer. If transparencies are created incorrectly, it can damage
the printer.
|
| Linux CDROM
(19 Sep 1997) |
It is possible to mount a cd on the linux machines without being root.
However, you must be logged on to the machine in person. You will
not have access remotely. In order to mount a cd,
|
| Running
Background Jobs
(19 Sep 1997) |
The interactive response of several departmental systems has been killed by a
large number of small, compute-bound background jobs which were started
incorrectly. The correct way to start a long-running background job is with a
% nice my_program The "nice" will alter the scheduling priority of the program so that it will interfere with interactive computing less than it normally would. In any event, background computing is better done on systems dedicated for that, the bg's. |