Newsflashes

New Shortcuts

Dr. G has created two pages describing some potentially handy UNIX shortcuts that you can add to your own accounts. For newer users, these are at BASH Shortcuts; for older users, they are at TCSH Shortcuts. In UNIX, type

echo $SHELL

to see which you should use.

Connection Time Out

• Teer machines now time out after 10 minutes of inactivity. The easiest way around this is to add the following line to the end of your .bashrc file or .cshrc file in your main CIFS directory. First, log in to a Teer machine and type

echo $SHELL

If the result is /bin/tcsh, edit the .cshrc file; if the result is /bin/bash, edit the .bashrc file. Here's the code to add:

xeyes -geometry 1x1-1-1 &

If that puts an xeyes window on your screen, try

xeyes -geometry 1x1-1-100 &

instead.

• • Note - if you are a /bin/bash person and have never made a .bash_profile before, you will need to make one. See the information here

This code will start the xeyes program in the background, but will put it off screen so you will not actually see it. When you close the terminal or PuTTY window, xeyes will close as well.

• • Note 2: if you use this, but you use shell escapes (for instance, the ! in MATLAB), the xeyes process will run each time... Meaning you could have thousands of eyes watching you from off-screen, thus significantly slowing things down.

xMaple

• xMaple is now run with xmaple again. xmaple17 continues to work.

Printing from LaTeX Documents

Due to an error in okular/CIFS and a missing program for evince, the process for actually printing a LaTeX document has changed slightly. Further documentation coming soon but the summary is:

• latex file.tex
• dvips -t letter file.dvi
• evince file.ps &

Now, any time you want to re-process the file, you need to run both latex and dvips on it to get a new version of the ps file. Fortunately, evince will load any new ps file that comes up. You can then print from evince without any troubles. Admittedly, one more run is required but at least it works!

Others

Anything of urgent concern will go here. Also see OIT Alerts and Dr. G's Machine States page for more information about possible outages.

• Some course numbers have been updated; others haven't. Work in progress!