An IDE for TeX

TeXnicCenter is an excellent IDE for developing TeX documents on Windows. It follows the usual interface conventions and is quite helpful in getting started and debugging. TeX is the standard page layout language for writing mathematical and scientific papers.

Here are some excellent tutorials for getting started with TeX.

The IDE requires MikTeX for actually compiling TeX files into PDF, PS, and so on.

Unknown root password in SuSE Linux

After I installed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, I tried to update it. It prompted me for a root password even though the install hadn’t asked for one — it had only created a regular user. Sudo didn’t help.

I tried booting in single-user mode, but that also prompted me for the root password.

Finally, I appended init=/bin/bash to the Linux boot command in GRUB. That booted me in a passwordless command line, letting me run passwd and fix things.

Repair table failed. Please run repair table.

One of the tables of my MediaWiki installation crashed. When I tried to repair it, I got this less-than-helpful error message. So did the mysqlcheck utility when I SSHed to the server. However, the command has extra options that can be used to repair high levels of corruptions, such as when the MYI is missing.

REPAIR TABLE tablename USE_FRM;