Kile, KDE 4.6 and autocompletion

After installing KDE 4.6 (from Kubuntu backports), LaTeX autocompletion was gone in Kile 2.1 β4. It worked on β5, which can be downloaded as a source tarball from the Kile homepage.

I followed the README instructions, but used sudo checkinstall instead of sudo make install to get a .deb package (source ubuntuforums). The kile executable didn't end up in a PATH directory, so I linked it into /usr/bin via cd /usr/bin; sudo ln -s ~/kile-install/bin/kile 
The package system tried to 'update' to β4, so I had to protect the newer version with e.g. sudo aptitude hold kile.

Note on a second install: with just cmake . / make / sudo checkinstall instead of the README approach I ended up with the kile executable in /usr/local/bin. I prefer that to the version in /home, as kile is integrated into the package system via checkinstall anyway.

Keynotifying PDF presentations

Update: (03/01/12) My version of pdf2odp.py now converts movies and Impress can actually play them. See this post for details.
Confession time: I did my defence on daWuzzzz's MacBook. The first reason was that I already had an Apple remote, the second was Keynote's excellent presenter console.
The downside was having to import my LaTeX/Beamer PDF presentation as images into Keynote and fiddling around with movie positioning afterwards.
You can do something like that purely on Linux - excluding the Apple remote :-) - so this post covers 3 topics:

• the PDF presenter console
• a harangue on crappy vector graphics import in OpenOffice and its presenter console
• using python scripts to convert PDF into ODF with page images

New bitch on the blog

To be precise, a partially wooden contraption charmingly christened Medusa (Asus U43JC-X1). Goodies include nVidia Optimus hybrid graphics, USB3 and an i5-450M processor with multithreading support.

How to get ImageMagick to convert PDF to PNG with reasonable image quality

Without special effort, converting PDF to a series of PNG images produces images that look kind of corroded. The reason for this is related to ImageMagick's ghostscript backend, which sucks at antialiasing.
Thus, the only way to get better images would be to convert at an insanely high resolution (convert's density option) and resize afterwards. This can be done in one go by ImageMagick:
convert -density 1000x1000 <thepdf.pdf> -resize <xsize>x test%03d.png
However, I found that running ghostscript separately reduces the eventual image size by a factor of 2-3. I don't know why, it seems to be relatively device-independent (tested with both png16m and pngalpha).
gs -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=test%03d.png -r1000 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH <mypdf.pdf>
for file in test???.png; do convert $file -resize <xsize>x $file; echo $file; done

Big problems with simple solutions

Number one: KnetworkManager claims "Network Management disabled", no matter what you do in YaST. This had me triple-boot Kubuntu for a few weeks, until Kubuntu had the same problem after a botched hibernation.
This worked on both for me:
Edit /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state Make sure it says NetworkingEnabled=true.

Number two: With the fixed network settings in place, I did a system update including a new kernel. What came up after the boot menu: "File not found ... You need to load kernel first"
Ouch. OK … google … The Kubuntu grub has to be told about SuSE's new kernel. I bang my head on the desk a few times (can't hurt, apparently there's nothing viable in it anyway) and run sudo update-grub in Kubuntu.

Samsung SCX-4200 on Kubuntu 10.04

Short summary: Don't use Samsung's Unified Driver (which worked OK on SuSE). The scanner works plug-and-play with Skanlite (not in Kubuntu default install, btw), and the printer works after adding it in CUPS without proprietary drivers.

Murphy's law - or triple boot using a thumb drive

The good: Windows 7's partitioner is great.
The bad: I did some update on Saturday afternoon which completely fried my KNetworkManager (it keeps claiming "Network management disabled", no matter what I do) - which is not good, considering that the unstable university wireless keeps kicking me out and I have to run YaST's network settings every time to reconnect. Also, for some reason, 11.3's suspend to RAM feature which I had really liked before in terms of shutdown/wake-up speed, froze my system several times. Not exactly good, either.

OpenSuSE 11.3 - less fun on a Samsung P35 - ATI woes continued

After the tremendously positive testing results of avocadohead with Tisiphone, I tried my luck some days ago with 11.3 on Thukydides, a Samsung P35 notebook, not the newest hardware and unfortunately with an ATI graphic card.