Remote Desktop with FreeNX

ssh is great. But sometimes I just need a desktop. The remote desktop functionality offered by Ubuntu is kind of limited. For example, I just don’t know how I can enable remote desktop easily in the first place if one is not in front of the host already. Moreover, Ubuntu’s remote desktop is limited to…

Almost kill my Ubuntu

I did an extremely stupid thing today. It all started when I tried to fix some conflicting issue of OpenCV and ffmpeg. I installed and reinstalled many times. I tried this on my desktop and eventually tried it also on my laptop. For some reasons, I could not install some required package (libxcb1-dev). It showed…

Obama’s Tariff

I am terribly disappointed with Obama’s tariff. Especially I believe that he is an intelligent person. He definitely should understand the reaction from Beijing and is well aware of the impact of Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to the Great Depression. He is basically risking all these for the political capital needed for his health reform. While…

Embedding all fonts in Ubuntu

It took me a while to finally manage to embed all fonts for pdf using Linux commands alone. Most conferences and journals require all fonts to be embedded for manuscript preparation. By default, pdflatex in Ubuntu suppose to embed all fonts. One can also change the setting using updmap. But the problem comes from the…

Video Chat with Ubuntu

It was a total pain to try to have skype and ubuntu jaunty work happily together.  My miscellaneous problems with mic just can never be resolved. The medibuntu package simply doesn’t work for me. I even go as far to uninstall pulseaudio. Unfortunately, even that doesn’t make my skype work. Mic worked for the first…

Install Kile 2.0 in Ubuntu 9.04

Like many others, I am very frustrated with the new Kile and Ubuntu Janty has chosen it as default. It is ridiculously slow and the text doesn’t do dynamic word wrap (YES, it doesn’t!). There is a tool to “auto-wrap” but it screws up comments if you use % often as I do. After several…

tvtk conflict with compiz

I tried the following simple tvtk example but it kept hang my ubuntu 8.10 machine. #!/usr/bin/env python from enthought.tvtk.api import tvtk cs=tvtk.ConeSource(resolution=100) mapper=tvtk.PolyDataMapper(input=cs.output) actor=tvtk.Actor(mapper=mapper) #create a renderer: renderer=tvtk.Renderer() # create a render window and hand it the renderer render_window = tvtk.RenderWindow(size=(400,400)) render_window.add_renderer(renderer) #dreate interactor and hand it the render window # this handles mouse interaction…

ffmpeg and OpenCV

As of Oct 11, 2009, I reinstalled OpenCV and ffmpeg again on Ubuntu Jaunty. The previous installation procedure doesn’t seem to work. I can install OpenCV but it doesn’t cooperate happily with ffmpeg. I came across this wonderful guide and it more or less solves all my problems. Below repeats some of the steps described…

Embed all fonts

IEEE always requires authors to embed all fonts for the final pdf submission. After some googling, the commands that works for me under Ubuntu are dvips -Pdownload35 -t letter -G0 -o paper.ps paper.dvi ps2pdf -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.2 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true  paper.ps paper.pdf If you have eps figures that are generated from matlab, most likely some fonts in…