name = Eduroam UW
author = Steven She
version = 1
require username *Username password *Password
-----
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
    ssid="$_ESSID"
    scan_ssid="$_SCAN"
    proto=RSN
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    pairwise=CCMP
    group=CCMP
    eap=PEAP
    identity="$_USERNAME"
    password="$_PASSWORD"
    ca_cert="/usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/GlobalSign_Root_CA.crt"
    phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
}

name = EAP-TTLS with PAP
author = Shawn MacLean
version = 1
require identity *Identity password *Password ca_cert *Path_to_CA_Cert
-----
network={
    ssid="$_ESSID"
    scan_ssid="$_SCAN"
    proto=WPA
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    pairwise=TKIP
    group=TKIP
    eap=TTLS
    ca_cert="$_CA_CERT"
    identity="$_IDENTITY"
    password="$_PASSWORD"
    phase2="auth=PAP"
}

Add eap-ttls to /etc/wicd/encryption/templates/active, restart the GUI and the settings should now appear in the dropdown menu.

So distributed source control systems seemed to fit the bill. I looked at two systems in particular, Mercurial and git. Mercurial caught my eye because of its simplicity, and similarity with the traditional, centralized SCMs such as CVS and Subversion. However, I actually started using git first. The reason was that many open source projects had switched to git and I needed to compile several bleeding edge packages. So, I had no choice but to learn to use git. However, I couldn’t really wrap my head around it. While git is no doubt, a very powerful SCM, it was also a very complicated SCM. I took me a good hour or so before I understood how to track branches.

So, I settled for Mercurial. While I was worried that Mercurial was too immature, the fact that the Mozilla projects are also using Mercurial was very comforting.

Usage, Tips and Tricks

I will not describe the setup and typical usage of Mercurial, since there are plenty of good tutorials out there. What I will do, is highlight some of the features that have really caught my eye and I find indispensible now.

The first great feature of Mercurial is the addremove command, which removes deleted files and adds newly created files to the repository. The command also has an optional parameter which you can specify the directory to process. I typically use ., such that my next commit would only contain the changes that I’ve made in the current directory.

hg addremove   #For the entire repository
hg addremove . #For the current directory

Another nice feature of Mercurial is its ability to ignore certain files and file patterns specified using a single .hgignore file. This is very convenient, for excluding temporary files, such as the intermediary files that are left behind after compiling LaTeX source code. Mercurial supports two syntax types when specifying patterns in .hgignore, glob and regex. The glob syntax allows you to specify patterns using wildcards (*). I primarily use regex, since regular expressions are very powerful.

Here are the contents of my current .hgignore:

syntax: regexp
.*.swp
.*.swo
^results/.*
^projects/.*/bin/
^lab/[0-9][0-9](winter|spring|fall)/.+\.(log|glo|glg|gls|dvi|aux|bm|bbl|blg|brf|ist|lof|lot|out|toc|vrb|ps)

After creating the .hgignore file, don’t forget to add it to the repository for tracking using:

hg add .hgignore

Tracking Branches

For those interested in how to track branches using git, here is the command that I used. the -b modifer creates a branch in the local repository. The checkout command further require the origin/ prefix for branches. In addition, the --track modifier tracks the remote branch such that a future pull will retrieve updates from the branch.

Using Mercurial:

hg co somebranch

Using git:

git checkout --track -b localbranch origin/somebranch

Update on git
Thanks to the comment by Jakub, tracking a remote branch is actually rather easy using the git remote command. Here is an example I had to do with retrieving a xf86-video-ati git repository.

git remote add agd5f git://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/xf86-video-ati/

To restrict the remote repository to a particular branch, use -t like the following:

git remote add agd5f -t agd-powerplay git://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/xf86-video-ati/

We can now fetch data from the remote repository using the command:

git fetch agd5f

We can list the branches that are present in our repository by executing the command. Note that the remote repository shows up just like a separate branch to our local repository:

git branch -r

Now, we can pull from this remote repository, and merge the changes from the branch agd-powreplay:

git pull agd5f agd-powerplay

Restoring a Single File to a Previous Revision

It seems that Mercurial is currently not able to checkout a single file or subdirectory. It is one of the “todo” items in their Google Summer of Code project this year, so perhaps we’ll have this feature soon enough. However, this is rather inconvenient at the moment. A workaround for this issue is to use the hg cat command, to view a previous revision of a file. In my case, I had overwritten a file applet.svg with changes that I did not want to keep. To revert the file, I executed:

hg cat applet.svg > applet.svg

Tags

In Mercurial, tags are simply aliases for changesets.

hg checkout -r tagname

git treats tags, branches and trunk/master as one and the same, in the sense that they are all refspecs. This is similar to Subversion’s model, however, tags and branches aren’t simply another directory in the repository. You have to add the tags/ prefix when checking out a tag:

Using git:

git checkout -b localtag tags/remotetag

Conclusions

I am very happy with Mercurial. I ran into a very annoying issue with Mercurial early on, when I executed hg fetch, and it used my repository URI, along with my username and password as a commit message. However, luckily this issue was fixed in the Mercurial 1.0 release. Admittedly, I’ve only been using a single person Mercurial repository for the past couple months, so I haven’t really experienced a situation where I needed the full power of a SCM. However, Mercurial has been so far, been smooth sailing.

Both PDFTeX and XeTeX create a PDF directly from the LaTeX source. XeTeX is built on PDFTeX, and is of particular interest since it has added support for TrueType and OpenType fonts. For beamer presentations, this was great, since it opens up a huge selection of fonts for use in presentations. To change the default font in the document with XeTeX, use the fontspec package. The xunicode package provides additional mapping between LaTeX accents and the selected font. A third package, xltxtra provides some fixes relating to fonts.

\documentclass[xetex,mathserif,serif]{beamer}
 
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode} %Unicode extras!
\usepackage{xltxtra}  %Fixes
\setmainfont{Calibri}
\setmonofont[Scale=0.86]{Andale Mono}

Of course, you should replace Calibri and Andale Mono with a font of your choice.

Another nice package to use with PDFTeX, is the microtype package, which provides better font output. Enable the package with this line:

\usepackage[final,expansion=true,protrusion=true,spacing=true,kerning=true]{microtype}

XeTeX and PGF / TiKZ

PGF / TiKZ is a TeX library for drawing graphics using the PDFTeX and XeTeX drivers. However, you may encounter the following error message when attempting to compile a presentation with PGF / TiKZ pictures in your Beamer slides:

Package pgf Warning: Your graphic driver pgfsys-dvipdfm.def does not supported marking the current position.

Unfortunately, the included TiKZ library in the TeXLive 2007 distribution does not support XeTeX. This causes cross-picture coordinates to break, which can be used to draw arrows between various TiKZ pictures in a Beamer frame.

While we wait for TeXLive 2008, you can install the new version of PGF from the CTAN which adds support for the XeTeX driver. Simply download the package, and copy the files to your local ~/texmf/tex/ directory and execute texhash to update the TeX listings.

XeTeX and Wide Pages

Although I haven’t had much time to investigate the issue, but it seems that the pgfpages package that is used with beamer, is not entirely compatible with XeTeX. In particular, the commands:

\usepackage{pgfpages}
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen}        %beamer
\pgfpagesuselayout{two screens with optional second} %pgfpages

is enough to have pdflatex generate notes to the right of the slide, but on xelatex it doesn’t have any effect. This post by Tomáš Janoušek to the XeTeX mailing list noted that the problem was due to a bug in the pgfpages package. Adding the following snippet fixes the probblem:

\renewcommand\pgfsetupphysicalpagesizes{%
    \pdfpagewidth\pgfphysicalwidth\pdfpageheight\pgfphysicalheight%
}

#!/bin/sh
IP=$(ifconfig eth0 | grep 'inet addr' | awk '{print $2;}' | cut -d: -f 2)
TOP2=$(echo $IP | cut -d. -f 1-2)
if [[ $TOP2 = '129.97' ]]; then
    echo 'Connected to UW Network...'
    lynx -dump -accept_all_cookies -post_data https://uw-wireless.uwaterloo.ca/login/index.php < ~/.uwwireless | grep 'Successfully Connected' | awk '{print $5;}'
else
    echo 'Not connected to UW Network...'
fi

Create the file ~/.uwwireless and place the following in the file, replacing the YOUR_USERID and YOUR_PASSWORD with your own:

userid=YOUR_USERID&password=YOUR_PASSWORD&mode=Connect

Depending on your version of Lynx, the script may fail if the SSL certificate from uw-wireless.uwaterloo.ca is not recognized. I don’t know of a better solution than simply removing the check. Make the following change in /etc/lynx.cfg (or wherever your lynx.cfg may reside) to remove the SSL certificate prompt:

FORCE_SSL_PROMPT:=yes

• First, the permissions are missing for the native Integrated Agent Controller code. Symbolic links were also not created for the Integrated Agent Controller libraries, resulting in a “File too short” error message when running the executable.
• Second, since the Integrated Agent Controller is native code, it requires shared libraries which may or may not be installed on your system.
• Third, several configuration files need to be writable by the user which executes Eclipse. I installed Eclipse using my own user (not root), so I did not run into this problem, however, there are several posts on the mailing list addressing this problem.

As a result, executing the Profiler within Eclipse would result in a cryptic “Unable to connect to localhost (port 10002)” message.

In order to get the Integrated Agent Controller running, we’ll need to fix the mentioned problems, here’s how to do it on Arch Linux:

1. Change your working directory to where the TPTP agent controller is installed:

   cd eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.tptp.platform.ac.linux_ia32_4.4.1.v200709261752/agent_controller

2. Fix the permissions of the executables:

   cd <tptp_agent_controller_dir>/bin
   chmod +x ACServer ACStart.sh ACStop.sh ACVersion.sh ChkPass RAServer RAStart.sh RAStop.sh SampleClient SetConfig.sh TimeCollector readme.txt tptpFileTransferAgent tptpProcessController</tptp_agent_controller_dir>

3. Fix the symbolic links for the linked libraries. The following list of files should point to their .so.4.4.0 counterparts. The easiest way to do this is just to download a copy of the standalone Agent Controller and to copy the lib directory to the lib directory of the Integrated Agent Controller:
   

   ./libtptpClient.so ./libjavaBaseAgent.so.4 ./libtptpUtils.so.4 ./libtptpAgentBase.so.4 ./libtptpUtils.so ./libtransportSupport.so.4 ./libbaseTransport.so.4 ./libhcclsm.so ./libhccldt.so.4 ./libhccls.so.4 ./libnamedPipeTL.so ./libhcclsm.so.4 ./libhcclco.so.4 ./libhccls.so ./libtptpACTL.so ./libtptpClient.so.4 ./libtransportSupport.so ./libtptpCmdExtr.so ./libhcjbnd.so ./libhcbnd.so ./libtptpCmdExtr.so.4 ./libtptpConfig.so ./libnamedPipeTL.so.4 ./libhcclco.so ./libpiAgent.so.4 ./libtptpCCTL.so ./libsocketTL.so ./libtptpCCTL.so.4 ./libjavaBaseAgent.so ./libprocessControlUtil.so.4 ./libtptpConfig.so.4 ./libcompSupp.so ./libtptpLogUtils.so ./libsharedMemTL.so.4 ./libtptpACTL.so.4 ./libprocessControlUtil.so ./libbaseTransport.so ./libpiAgent.so ./libhclaunch.so ./libsocketTL.so.4 ./libhcthread.so ./libcompSupp.so.4 ./libtptpLogUtils.so.4 ./libtptpAgentBase.so ./libhcthread.so.4 ./libsharedMemTL.so ./libhcbnd.so.4 ./libhcjbnd.so.4 ./libhclaunch.so.4 ./libhccldt.so

4. Install the compatibility libraries using the PKGBUILD located in this wiki article.
5. Ensure your configuration files are writable by the Eclipse user.
6. Occasionally, the Agent Controller leaves behind profiling data in the /tmp/IBMRAC directory which causes problems with subsequent executions of the Agent Controller. Delete /tmp/IBMRAC in order to remove the temporary files.
7. Note: Occasionally, a Java process may prevent the Agent Controller from exiting properly. Killing the appropriate process will allow the controller to be restarted. A ‘killall java’ generally does the trick

sudo passwd root

To switch to the root user in the shell:

su

Alternatively, you can switch to the root user in the shell without enabling the user account by using the following command:

sudo -s

The problem with this is that the file I have are fixed length records. When specifying the record length, dd goes and trims the trailing spaces off each record. To fix this:

dd conv=ascii if=[in file] | fold -w[record length] > [out file]

Step 1: X Server Settings
Edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and look for the “InputDevice” section, make sure it looks like this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″
Option “Buttons” “7″
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
EndSection

Make sure that the ‘Buttons’ is ‘7′, ‘Protocol’ is ‘ExplorerPS/2′, and ‘ZAxisMapping’ is ‘4 5′.

Step 2: Install imwheel
Type:

sudo apt-get install imwheel

Reboot, and it should work!