Raimar Sandner

Mathematica had a rather ugly looking user interface on Ubuntu Karmic 64bit, but it was all right on a Gentoo 32bit system. I don't know the reason for this, but I managed to improve the situation on Ubuntu. I forced mathematica to use the system Qt libraries and specified the Qt style in the mathematica launcher script.

I wanted the navigation bar (the thing on the left with "articles", "categories" etc.) on this homepage to be visible also for archive pages and permanent links. This is how to convince nanoblogger to do it.

Converting several jpg files to pdf results in a segmentation fault on Ubuntu Karmic (ImageMagick 6.5.1-0). A workaround is to use a different compression algorithm:

# zip compression
convert *.jpg -compress zip output.pdf
# no compression (large files)
convert *.jpg +compress output.pdf

The bug is fixed in newer versions of ImageMagick. If you don't want to install a lot of packages from the lucid repository, you can use karmic packages from my ppa. This is the newest release to this date (version 6.6.0-7). I have not tested it extensively, but the packages seem to work.

This is one of the tools I wish I had learned about years ago. Did you ever configure an LDAP-Server or a complicated postfix setup with several trial and error attempts until it was working as expected, and after a few weeks you had no idea what the key steps were? With "script" and "scriptreplay" you can record an entire console session and replay it later.