Manually compiling and installing PGPlot

Compiling and installing PGPlot may be tricky, because no default build tools are provided. Common issues include compilation problems in general, no generation of a shared library or problems building it (-fPIC), no linking against X11, etc. Stealing from the Gentoo Linux PGPlot ebuild script, here is how it can be done on Gentoo and Arch Linux, and hopefully on MacOSX.

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Git: pushing to and pulling from multiple remote locations: remote, url and pushurl

When pushing to or pulling from a remote url in git, the meaning of –all seems to be different between when git push –all is invoked and when calling git pull –all. Here’s my empirically obtained understanding of how you can configure git to push to and/or pull from multiple remote urls.

Installing Yaourt on Arch linux

One of the cool things about Arch linux is the Arch User Repository (AUR), where users can add their favourite packages to Arch. Because there is a liability, AUR packages cannot be installed by Pacman automatically, but should be downloaded, checked and installed manually. Often, you’ll have good reason to assume that the package is fine, and a superficial check is sufficient. Yaourt is an installer that can be used instead of or in addition to Pacman, and which also allows easy install of AUR packages. In theory, therefore, you’ll need to manually install only two AUR packages: Yaourt and its dependency package-query. Here’s how to do that.

Process kwin uses 100% CPU when KDE screen is locked

For some time now, I have noticed that my laptop fan started to make a lot of noise after I locked my screen. Switching to a console and running (a)top, I found that the kwin process was causing this by using 100% of one of my four CPU cores. I found that the problem goes away when I use the Simple Locker instead of a Screen Saver.

How to insert the Euro symbol (€) in emacs

In order to insert the Euro symbol (€) in emacs, you can use the Unicode character U+20AC by typing

C-x 8 RET #x20AC RET

Football world cup vs. Tour de France

Many people I know seem wonder why I don’t feel like cheering for “my” national team (actually, I don’t really own it nor do I bear any responsibility for it) during the football World Cup, but do like to watch the Tour the France. Conversely, I think that I should be the judge of what I watch and whether I should express irrational shauvinism by cheering for a team just because the players hold passports of the same nation as I (either because of birth or because of naturalisation) and wanting them to win even in the (obviously rare) case where they are not the best team, or not. In addition, I think riding the Tour the France is just as pointless as, but more of an achievement than playing in the World Cup, and hence following the Tour is more interesting to me than watching football.

Here are some numbers as to why there may well be some objective truth in that. Let’s see how much sport is actually done during the World Cup and during the Tour the France.

How to obtain a licence file for the Intel C/C++ or Fortran compilers on Linux

In the past one could register at Intel and obtain a non-commercial licence for their C/C++ and Fortran compilers. Currently, you must download and install the software as well, amounting to several gigabytes. If your compiler is already installed, e.g. because it is part of your Linux distribution as in the case of Gentoo, here’s how to get the licence file without downloading too much data.

HP Photosmart C6380 wireless scanner doesn’t work in Kubuntu

I installed Kubuntu on my mom’s pc. Everything seemed to work, except scanning using the HP Photosmart C6380 All-in-one printer over the wireless network. Printing with the same device using wifi did work. It turned out I should have installed the printer using hplip, not using the KDE System Settings.

Language / locale settings on Kubuntu

I recently installed a Dutch-language version of Kubuntu on my aunt’s laptop and on a friend’s PC. There were some issues regarding the language or locale settings: programs would start up in English despite the Dutch locale, or I would get complaints about the locale settings when running programs on/from the command line. Here’s how they were solved.

Colourised package manager for Arch Linux

I’ve played around a bit to find a proper package manager for Arch Linux that can install packages from both the official repositories and the Arch User Repository, and shows nice colours. I looked at pacman, packer-color and yaourt, and decided yaourt works best for me when custom colours are used.