Halfbaked Ideas

A little over a month ago I wrote about my off and on efforts to get the Leo text editor running under linux with decent looking antialiased fonts. At long last I have succeeded. Not through any heroic efforts on my part, but by waiting for python and tcltk to finally provide the needed font [...]

I ran across a  tip I want to preserve and pass along.  The original post is at The Telarah Times.
apt-get build-dep <package_name>
This will get all the dependencies needed to compile your package - providing that package_name is something that would normally install using a simple apt-get install command.
For example:If you wanted to download and install [...]

The great thing about Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives is the apt package system. Most of the time apt makes installing, deleting, or updating software trivially easy. In rare cases, appropriate apt packages are not available, or the packages are not quite correct. I ran into one of those cases trying to install Ruby [...]

I want to record what I had to do to get man page support working correctly in emacs erlang-mode under Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
First, set the erlang root directory for erlang-mode:

(setq erlang-root-dir “/usr/lib/erlang”)

Next put a symbolic link to the man pages in the erlang root directory.

cd /usr/lib/erlang
sudo rmdir man #the man dir installed by [...]

I’m interested in learning a bit about the Jabber/XMPP protocol. There’s only one way I know to do so, and that is to mess with it. So I decided to install a Jabber server, ejabberd.
Installing ejabberd on Ubuntu is easy, but I hit an immediate roadblock: ejabberd has a web-based administrative interface, but following installation, [...]

Some months ago I bought a Seagate FreeAgent usb drive. It turned out that the drive did not play well with linux. After 15 idle minutes it spins down, and closes the usb connection. Later it remounts read-only. After much digging around in the Ubuntu forums I was able to make it work correctly. I [...]

I’ve been curious about the xmonad window manager, and decided to install it on Gutsy. Here’s the drill. First we install some required libraries, and Haskell (needed to compile xmonad).

sudo aptitude install libxext-dev libghc6-mtl-dev libxt-dev ghc6

Next download the source for xmonad and its prerequisites.

wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/mtl/1.0/mtl-1.0.tar.gz;
wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/X11-extras/0.4/X11-extras-0.4.tar.gz;
wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/X11/1.2.3/X11-1.2.3.tar.gz ;
wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/xmonad/0.4/xmonad-0.4.tar.gz ;

Now build the packages [...]