More 2 Cent Tips & Tricks LG #30

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# More 2¢ Tips!

Send Linux Tips and Tricks to gazette@ssc.com

### Contents:

- Producing a Resume in PDF with LaTeX
- UNIX System man Pages
- ext2 Partitions
- Re: bpp 16 Question
- Network Cards
- Tip for using Windows 95 buttons in KDE
- PPP, SLIP and Other Remote Service Support

### Producing a resume in PDF with LaTeX

From: David M. Cook davecook@hotmail.com
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 23:05:24 +0000

LaTeX and the resume.sty package are an easy way to produce a very attractive resume under Linux. One just needs to fill in the boilerplate provided. resume.sty is available from any CTAN archive, such as cdrom.com:
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/.1/tex/ctan/macros/latex209/contrib/resume

However, I've found that windows users are often not familiar with the usual Postscript output of the dvips program or how to view it. Luckily, Ghostscript provides the ps2pdf program for converting Postscript to Adobe's Portable Document Format, which is fairly familiar to windows users.

However, converted ps documents that were produced from LaTeX source using the default Computer Modern fonts look very poor when read with the Adobe PDF reader. The trick is to use the times package, which changes all the fonts produced by your LaTeX source to one the Adobe reader can handle. Just include the package like this in your document:

    \documentclass[12pt]{article}
    \usepackage{resume,times}
    %other preamble commands
    \begin{document}
    %document body
    \end{document}

Some other things worth mentioning here: PStill, another PS->PDF converter; pdfTeX, which produces PDF instead of DVI files from TeX input; and finally the TeX User's Group page which has tons of great links:
ftp://ftp.cstug.cz/pub/tex/local/cstug/thanh/pdftex/
http://www.this.net/~frank/pstill.html
http://www.tug.org/interest.html

--
Dave Cook

### UNIX system man pages

From: Andrew Josey a.josey@opengroup.org
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 1998 10:10:41 +0000

Hello, included is a possible tip for the Linux Gazette.

Ever needed to know what the official UNIX man page for a particular command or function says? A new web resource from The Open Group is the Common Access to the UNIX Man Pages, a hypertext html set of browsable pages common to all UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 branded systems.

To try it out see http://www.opengroup.org/common_access/

--
Andrew Josey

### ext2 Partitions

From: Albert T. Croft acroft@cyber-wizard
Date: Mon, 08 Jun 1998 14:57:03 -0500

I recently ran into a small problem, and I think the results of it might be helpful to others. I was recently helping out a friend with a problem on his Linux machine, and we needed to find a file-unfortunately, neither of us knew where it might've been installed.

Having both ext2 and vfat partitions, we realized that doing a find command might take a while, and would probably give some false results. We knew there might be files with similar names on his vfat partition-files we were sure were not the ones we were looking for. We knew the files we were looking for would only be on the ext2 partitions.

We started looking for an answer with the -mount option for the find command; unfortunately for us, it only looked at files on the same device as the path given to the find command. (A look at the results of the mount command shows why that would be a problem for us.)

     /dev/hda2 on / type ext2 (rw)
     none on /proc type proc (rw)
     /dev/hda6 on /home type ext2 (rw)
     /dev/hda8 on /tmp type ext2 (rw)
     /dev/hda7 on /usr type ext2 (rw)
     /dev/hda1 on /win95 type vfat (rw,umask=0111)

We tried writing a batch file, using grep and gawk to get the mount points for the ext2 partitions and handing them to find. This proved unworkable if we were looking for patterns, such as h2*. We then tried to write just a find command, using gawk and grep to get the mount points. This was somewhat better, but using a print statement in gawk to get the names of the mount points wouldn't work. Some help came with remembering that gawk has a printf statement, allow.

Our final product, which we found quite useful and now have in our .bashrc files as linuxfind, is the following:

     find `mount|grep ext2|gawk '{printf "%s ", $3}'` -name

To use as an alias:

    alias linuxfind="find `mount|grep ext2|gawk '{printf "%s ", $3}'` -name "

Written this way, other options to the find command can be specified, such as `-perm`, `-exec` and `-type`. To use it, we simply type something like:

     linuxfind less
     linuxfind h2*
     linuxfind x* -perm -2000

The only problems we can see with this command so far are (1) if there are drives mounted at login that are unmounted during the session, the mount points are still searched, and (2) if a drive is mounted after login, it is not included unless the .bashrc files is sourced.

--
Albert Croft

### Re: bpp 16 Question

From: Michael Huttinger mhutt.removespam@netnitco.net
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 19:56:41 +0000

In regards to the question on starting X with 16 bitplanes instead of 8 (LG#28)...

I have done the following (assuming you are using XFree86)

Open up and edit your XF86Config file.

Look for the "Screen" section you are using. Add an entry right after that specifying the default colors of the format:

          DefaultColorDepth   16

This will default your screen to 16 bit planes.

My example screen section follows:

    Section "Screen"
        Driver      "accel"
        Device      "STB Velocity 128"
        Monitor     "My Monitor"
        DefaultColorDepth 16
        Subsection "Display"
            Depth       8
            Modes       "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
            ViewPort    0 0
        EndSubsection
        Subsection "Display"
            Depth       16
            Modes       "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
            ViewPort    0 0
        EndSubsection
        Subsection "Display"
            Depth       24
            Modes       "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
            ViewPort    0 0
        EndSubsection
        Subsection "Display"
            Depth       32
            Modes       "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
            ViewPort    0 0
        EndSubsection
    EndSection

--
Mike Huttinger

### Network Cards

From: Wari Wahab wari@tecnologist.com
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 21:36:27 +0800

Hi, there just like to give some tip or two regarding Network cards you have in you Linux Box.

I have a 3Com 3c90x in my computer and it's not working up to speed, I replaced it with anther one of the same kind and the most I get out of ftp transfers from my machine is a measly 220 KB/s.. Samba acted weird.. I thought that it's my network that caused the problem, indeed, it is the problem..

Our network is all Cisco and there seems to be some disagreement between the two brands, Changed my card to an Intel 'eepro100' and I can max out at 800 KB/s on a 10 Mbs network.. Cool.

So, if you find out that performance is not as cool (those Win NT guys may be laughing at you as they did to me wondering why Linux is Super Slow) as it should be, it could be the network card itself..

Regards,
Wari Wahab

### Tip for using Windows 95 buttons in KDE

From: Jochen A. Stein jst@writeme.com
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 21:05:21 +0200

Following up to Andreas Ehliar's 2cent article in the June Linux Gazette, I took the same approach and made a patch for KDE to shift some functionality from ALT to the W95 key. Full instructions and patch against Beta-4 can be found on http://home.pages.de/~jst/kde-w95.html.

--
Jochen Stein

### PPP, SLIP and Other Remote Service Support

From: Daniel Blezek blezek@worldnet.att.net
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 22:40:48 -0500

Hi, here's a short tip:

Recently, I started working from home on a UNIX system. The system I was working on did not support PPP, SLIP, or any other remote service except shell sessions over a 9600 baud modem. So I decided to download SLIrP(a program to emulate PPP/SLIP using only a shell session) to the remote system to emulate PPP over a shell connection. Here is the snag, the remote system did not support zmodem, ymodem, kermit or any of the other file transfer protocols. Since I had no TCP/IP connection, I could not use rsh, or ftp. Solution? I used uuencode to convert the SLIrP binary to text, started vi on the remote system, and copied and pasted the entire text(all 360K) into the remote shell session. After eating dinner, I returned to write the uuencoded binary to the remote hard disk, uudecoded it, uncompressed it, and started up SLIrP on the remote system. After pppd came up on my LINUX system, I was fully connected.

Ain't LINUX fun?

--
Dan

Published in Linux Gazette Issue 30, July 1998

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