LeoTech

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.

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.

Trac is an excellent web-based wrapper for SVN that adds bug tracking, a wiki, and several handy project management features. I keep setting up new repositories up for all the little projects we cook up in DB2 Technical Marketing, so I thought I’d write up a guide.

Installing Trac, SVN, and dav_svn for Apache2 is left as an exercise for the reader.

Create a new SVN repository:

Create a new Trac environment:

Change the owner to Apache so that it can read and write:

Navigate to Apache site settings:

If you want Trac to support multiple repositories, edit the trac file to look like this:

The above assumes that all the repositories are in /var/trac

Navigate to Apache settings:

Append to dav_svn.conf:

The above lets you check out from http://yoursite/svn/Project

If you like, you can add a new user to dav_svn.psswd:

Users can then be granted permissions by editing the dav_svn.authz file. Sample file:

Restart Apache:

killall apache2
apache2

You now have have an Trac/SVN install with SVN at http://yoursite/svn/Project and Trac at http://yoursite/trac.cgi