Stephan Bourduas

When you want to install a unstable/beta version of a package in Gentoo, the recommended way is to unmask the package you want to install by adding a corresponding entry to the "/etc/portage/package.keywords" file. The problem is that more often than not, the package you want to install will require you to unmask other (sometimes many) packages, requiring you to iteratively add packages to the keywords file until the install process can complete without errors.

After installing Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) on a HP Pavilion dv9600 series laptop (dv9625 to be exact), I was able to reboot and have everything work properly except for the wireless driver. The wireless device is a Broadcom BCM4312, which unfortunately doesn't work with the bcm43xx driver that is available under Gutsy. The only other option is to use ndiswrapper, which I prefer to avoid if given the choice.

I've previously posted a description of how I use OpenOffice to create EPS files with proper font embedding. The process involves:

1. exporting to PDF from OpenOffice.
2. converting the PDF to EPS using "pdftops".
3. fixing the bounding box using "ps2eps".

I've been doing this so often, that I've created a script I've called "oopdf2eps" to automate the process. Converting to eps now involves executing 1 command:

$ oopdf2eps figure.pdf
pdftops -eps figure.pdf - | ps2eps > figure.eps

As a long time Gentoo users, I've gotten used to 'less' being able to pretty print HTML files or let me view gzipped files without the need to do

$ zcat text.gz | less

Well, when I started using Kubuntu recently, I found that only the vanilla version of less is installed by default. There is a basic lesspipe program that exists, but it's not as feature rich as the lesspipe.sh script that Gentoo uses.

I tried generating a document using Palatino fonts using the 'palatino' and 'mathpazo' packages, and the resulting document did not look good at all. There was something wrong with the font hinting that caused characters to vary in size, making it look like the text was written by a child. After doing some digging, I found the Latex Font Catalogue, which lists many nice fonts which can be used instead of the default postscript ones.

If you use dvips and then ps2pdf to generate your PDF documents, you're no doubt using encapsulated postscript (EPS) files for your figures. The advantage to using EPS over formats like JPEG, GIF, or PNG is that EPS is a Vector Graphics format, which means that you can scale the image up or down without getting pixelation (check out the example on the Wikipedia page). For that reason, EPS graphics are very convenient to use in your latex documents because you can resize your figures easily depending on the document type.

I've been working with PSL/Sugar lately to verify some VHDL code. Anyone who's ever coded knows how useful syntax highlighting is, so when I started editing PSL, I was quite annoyed to find that there no syntax highlighting available iin Vim for PSL. I did some searching on the net and found this user contributed syntax file for PSL/Verilog. I tried using posted syntax file 'as is', but it wouldn't work for me.

I've been using a custom bash prompt for a few years now, and I figured I'd post it here for whoever wants to copy it. The format of the prompt is basically "[time][host][path]$" I sometimes like to switch between showing a long or truncated path in the prompt. In order to make switching between the two versions, I created a simple function called 'myprompt' which changes the PS1 string based on the command line parameter. An example switching from short to long style is shown below:

If you're using the command line like I do most of the time, then you can use a 'Makefile' in order to create your PDFs. Notice that I use 'ps2pdf14' instead of 'ps2pdf'. Also note the values of 'PS2PDF_OPTS'; these were required in order to conform to IEEE submission standards where all fonts are embedded in the PDF.

When I wanted to install Debian on an old P2, I couldn't boot from the CD because the old bios didn't support it. I instead used a script called 'debootstrap' on a working machine with a net connection. My host OS was Gentoo and debootstrap was available in portage: