Installing latex on hostmonster

In continuation with my previous post (Some times yahoo is better), I followed the steps on how to install latex/tetex on my web host from here (You can also get the Installation steps from QuickInstall file in source code or access the same file from tug.org).

But the problem is that on web hosts like hostmonster you won’t have root access so you will need to modify some of the things and do a local install in your home directory.

For that you can specify –prefix accordingly while doing ./configure. So you need to do:

./configure --prefix=/home/username/local/teTeX
replace username with your account name

This step ended without any errors But while I was doing make world, the process exited with following error:

/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.a when searching for -lXt
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so when searching for -lX11

I found this thread, where they were discussing similar error and from what I got it was due to machine platform. So I checked my host system information with

uname -a
from there I got x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux which meant its a 64 bit architecture.

So after some tweaking to what I found here(CBLFS: TeTeX) to make it work for local install, you can do following to compile the package:

CC="gcc ${BUILD64}" CXX="g++ ${BUILD64}" USE_ARCH=64 \
./configure --prefix=/home/username/local/teTeX/ \
–enable-shared \
–without-texinfo \
–with-x=no \
–with-system-ncurses \
–with-system-zlib &&
[ -f texk/libtool ] && sed -i “/sys_lib_search_path_spec=/s:/lib:&64:g” texk/libtool;

And then you can do

make world
make all install

You can then add generated executable to your system path by:

PATH=/home/username/local/teTeX/bin/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu:$PATH;
export PATH

You can also configure your installation using:

texconfig

And its DONE Find all steps followed by me here
So if you want to install on 32 bit config the method at Microcontroller programming Blog should work fine.
Also read: The Tetex HowTo

You can download required packages using wget on shell account at hostmonster from ctan.org

Open source is key to reaching 500 million Indian children

An interesting article by Mark Rais on role of open source in making education available to the large youth population of india. And a greta initiative by CII-Shiksha.

To support more than 650,000 villages and one half billion youths who need education, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) created a nonprofit organization called Shiksha India in 2001. One of Shiksha’s primary initiatives was the creation of a collaborative online Web portal, which the president of India launched in a formal ceremony last month. The new e-learning and collaboration portal uses open source technology such as Moodle, Drupal, and MediaWiki.

In my opinion the reason behind its success can be attributed to mainly: its free of cost availabilty which is big issue in regard to country like India, where population(half billion) which need attention is much higher and money involved if proprietary softwares are being used. And other important aspect which article mentions is in the ability to customize and provide products in local languages (including Hindi and Tamil) along with chosing most suited among vast available resources.
Another important issue which can be solved with open source is large scale piracy, currently software piracy laws are not so strict in india but still piracy is a getting a major issue.

“The bad side is that with so much available, a newcomer to OSS is bound to get confused about what to use.” He says this is often exacerbated due to some projects being fixated on proving that their product is best.

Other than that at present, their are linux distributons like Ubuntu, which is quite user friendly and its available in many flavours. Also earlier there has also been efforts in shifting towards linux and other open source mediums like :
LIC opts for Linux
Taking Free Software to the Farmers and Fields of India
Kerala logs Microsoft out

Linux.com : Open source is key to reaching 500 million Indian children
Program Details for Shiksha India

February 26, 2007 | Filed Under india, linux | Leave a Comment

Some useful command line tricks

SEOmoz.org has listing of linux commnad that may be useful in web development but they are uerful otherwise too.
Some of them are here:

ln -s /some/destination name_of_link
ctrl+z and bg
scp : scp user@example.com:~/dir /destination

Read More : Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks
Some other Miscellaneous Tricks:

ls -lSr List files (sorted by size)

df -h Show available disk space in human-readable format

du -sh /some/dir Show how much space /some/dir is taking up

February 6, 2007 | Filed Under linux, listing | Leave a Comment

Cleaning up a Ubuntu GNU/Linux system

I’m using ubuntu dapper, and i came across this nice ubuntu blog : Ubuntu Tutorials, having post on how to clean your ubuntu system to remove residual config packages, partial packages to free up your disk space. it also provides screen shot to help you follow the process. it also explains how to use localpurge, deborhan and other tools.

Read more >> Cleaning up a ubuntu system

Related post : How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!

January 30, 2007 | Filed Under linux, tips | 1 Comment

Hide data in files with easy steganography tools

Earlier I wrote about Steganography, also how data/messages can be hidden in image files in these posts :
How to hide files in JPEG’s
Steganography app hides a messages in plain sight
today i find this article on lifehacker, It discusses some windows tools ( Hide in Picture ) that can be used to hide data in images.

Other free Windows tools offer more filetype support. wbStego can encode and decode files in PDF’s, HTML files or bitmaps. mp3stego embeds text inside MP3 files (command line and GUI interface available.) Here are more Windows stego software options [via Webby’s World].

How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!

Excellent guide..!!
This guide will help you understand with screenshots, instructional videos and to-the-point language.

Ten Cool Coreutils Commands

While a few commands, such as ‘cd’ are built directly into bash; many of the most important commands come from coreutils, a GNU package containing over a hundred commands. Some are the well known commands such as ‘ls’, ‘mv’ and ‘cat’.

This list includes : tac, ps, stat, wc, split etc.
Read More >> to know their usage and other commands in the list.
source : Command Line Warriors

January 6, 2007 | Filed Under linux, listing | 3 Comments

Using Telnet to send mail (By SMTP)

You : telnet 25
Server : Trying ???.???.???.???…
Connected to
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 ESMTP Sendmail ?version-number?;
You : Helo
Server : 250 mail.domain.ext
You : mail from
Server : 250 ok
You : rcpt to:
Server : 250 ok

To start composing the message issue the command data
You: data You : Subject:-type subject here-
then press enter twice
You may now proceed to type the body of your message
To tell the mail server that you have completed the message enter a single “.” on a line on it’s own.
Server : 250 ok ???????? Message accepted for delivery You can close the connection by issuing the QUIT command.
You : QUIT

October 11, 2006 | Filed Under linux, tutorial | Leave a Comment

Dilbert & Linux

Also Check : Dilbert & IITs

October 4, 2006 | Filed Under humor, image, linux | Leave a Comment

Java JRE/JDK installation

To verify that the installation was successful, execute

java -version

The output should look something like this if everything is well

java version "1.5.0_05"Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_05-b05)Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_05-b05, mixed mode)

If the version does not match what you just installed then you might have JRE/JDK installed previously

Multiple JRE/JDK installed

If you have multiple JRE or JDK installed (e.g. 1.5.0 and 1.4.2) and want/need to switch between them, you can use update-alternatives to do so.

Example: Choosing which java executable to use:

update-alternatives –config java

Example: Choosing which javac executable to use:

update-alternatives –config javac

And so on in that fashion for the remaining executables related to Java. You can look in /etc/alternatives to see what one can configure with update-alternatives.
Links : Download

October 4, 2006 | Filed Under linux, tutorial | Leave a Comment