Re: authoring math documents (tex?)

[Stephen Ryan]

On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 18:38 -0400, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
> papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows to
> Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
> should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text guy,
> I did not know what to tell her.  
> 
> Looking through the available packages I saw
> TeXmacs
> openoffice.org-math
> among others.  
> 
> Then I realized someone on this list would have useful advice.
> 
> Thanks.
> 

What kind of math papers are we talking about?  If this is just for a
course or two, it's probably not worth the effort involved in learning
anything specialized, so the equation editor in a word processor would
do the trick.  I wrote my senior thesis in college using a word
processor, but that's only because I didn't know any better.

For a degree in math, or for research that she's hoping to publish, or
for longer papers, LaTeX is the best choice; there is a lot to learn,
but there are a bunch of good books to help, and the extra power offered
by LaTeX is... well, kind of like the extra power offered by a
fully-loaded Linux installation over a bare-bones Windows 1.0
installation.  FWIW, there are more mathematical journals that will take
LaTeX files than there are journals that will take Word files.  My grad
school thesis was written in LaTeX, and the process was much more
straightforward, despite being a book instead of a paper and more
complicated material than the undergraduate thesis was.

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Re: authoring math documents (tex?)

[Bruce Labitt]

If she is doing a mathematically intensive paper, hands down, use 
LaTeX.  (Or LyX)  The other word processors don't even come close.  One 
can find document styles that match professional publications if that is 
desired.  There is a learning curve, of course, but the quality of the 
typesetting is unparalleled.  For the content, you are on your own. :)
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Re: Fun with lirc and streamzap...

[Bruce Labitt]

Ben Scott wrote:
> On 6/10/07, Bruce Labitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>   
>> kernel.i686  2.6.20-1.2948.fc6
>> kernel.i686  2.6.20-1.2952.fc6
>> kernel-devel.i5862.6.20-1.2948.fc6
>> kernel-devel.i5862.6.20-1.2952.fc6
>> 
>
>   Okay, from the above, we can tell that you've got two versions
> installed for each of the "kernel" and "kernel-devel" packages.  It's
> perfectly okay for kernel packages to have multiple versions
> installed.  It lets you rollback to an old version if something goes
> wrong with an upgrade.
>
>   What's not okay is that the main kernel packages, "kernel", are for
> the i686 architecture, while the "kernel-devel" package are for the
> i586 architecture.
>
>   To fix this, try this:
>
>   rpm --erase --allmatches kernel-devel
>
> which should remove the bogus packages.  Then do:
>
>   yum install kernel-devel
>
> which should install the latest package, and for the proper architecture.
>
>   You might run into dependency problems with the --erase command (if
> something else already installed depends on the kernel-devel package).
>  The easiest way around that is to tell RPM to ignore dependencies
> with the "--nodeps" switch, i.e.:
>
>   rpm --erase --allmatches --nodeps kernel-devel
>
> Normally, once does not want to tell RPM to ignore dependencies (they
> exist for very good reason, and ignoring them is usually a recipe for
> trouble), but since the goal here is to immediately re-install the
> proper package, you'll be okay when you're done.
>
> -- Ben
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>
>   
Thanks Ben,

That part seemed to work.  I tried to build lirc after running the setup 
for configuration.  Everything ran, there were warnings, but no errors.  
Of course nothing (streamzap) works yet...

Bruce

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Re: authoring math documents (tex?)

[Jim Kuzdrall]

On Monday 11 June 2007 18:38, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
> papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows
> to Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
> should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text
> guy, I did not know what to tell her.
>
> Looking through the available packages I saw
> TeXmacs
> openoffice.org-math
> among others.

I write a lot of math papers - or rather, papers with a lot of math 
in them.  There are two ways I do it.

Most of us doing math these days use Maple, Mathcad, Mathematical, 
or some similar symbolic math program to do the tedious algebraic 
grinding.  I happen to use Macsyma for Win98 (a much enhanced GUI 
version of the Unix command line program) which puts out answers in 
nice mathematical pretty print.  After exporting the output to pdf, I 
use Kpdf to extract the output results I want as an image to show in 
the report.  Just put copy your selection box to the clipboard and 
"special paste" it into OO.

Macsyma Inc went under years ago, but I assume the current symbolic 
math programs will "print" results to pdf also.

In the less common situation where I just want to show a 
mathematical relationship that contains calculus (such as the Planck 
blackbody radiation integral), the math feature of OpenOffice works 
fine.

It might help to play around with the OO math features a bit over 
the summer, but I think she will find the professor requesting that all 
students use one of the symbolic math packages to both solve the 
problems and do the report.

The right reasoning and solution should count a lot more than the 
pretty printing, but you never know these days.

Jim Kuzdrall
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Re: authoring math documents (tex?)

[Michael Costolo]

On 6/11/07, Lloyd Kvam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows to
Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text guy,
I did not know what to tell her.

Looking through the available packages I saw
TeXmacs
openoffice.org-math
among others.

Then I realized someone on this list would have useful advice.

Thanks.

--
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp



What grade will she be in?  Straight LaTeX might not be too hard to learn.
There is an IDE  for it for Linux which might
make learning the commands a bit easier.  The PDF output rendering has
improved dramatically in the last handful of years.  But there's also LyX
which is basically a WSYWIG front end to LaTeX.

I've never liked the results I get in the word processor software packages,
but I've never used OpenOffice.  If she's inclined to like markup languages,
LaTeX is the way to go.

-Mike-

--
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,
but too early to shoot the bastards."
--- Claire Wolfe
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Re: authoring math documents (tex?)

[mike ledoux]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 06:38:47PM -0400, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
> papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows to
> Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
> should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text guy,
> I did not know what to tell her.  

Learning LaTeX and editing it directly is still the best solution, IMO.

-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  OpenPGP KeyID 0x57C3430B
Holder of Past Knowledge   CS, O-
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."  William Shakespeare

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authoring math documents (tex?)

[Lloyd Kvam]

My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows to
Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text guy,
I did not know what to tell her.  

Looking through the available packages I saw
TeXmacs
openoffice.org-math
among others.  

Then I realized someone on this list would have useful advice.

Thanks.

-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp

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[GNHLUG] Seacoast / Durham / UNH - Picasa - Mon 11 June (tonight)

[Ben Scott]

Who  : Rob Anderson
What : Picasa - Google's photo management software
Date : Mon 11 June 2007
Time : 7 PM to 9 PM
Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH

For the June meeting of the SLUG (Seacoast Linux User Group), Rob
Anderson will be demo'ing Picasa.  Picasa is Google's photo management
offering.  It is available to work with Linux.

For more information and the free download for Linux go to:

http://picasa.google.com/linux

http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug/Members/rea/SLUG/slug-meetings/a-look-at-picasa
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[GNHLUG] NHRuby.org Meeting TOMORROW, June 12: A Medley of Rails Topics

[Scott Garman]

The Ruby on Rails community is abuzz with new energy and excitement
after last month's RailsConf in Portland, OR. Check out what the NH Ruby
scene is up to by dropping by our June meeting!

WHEN: Tuesday, June 12, 2007. 7-9 PM.
WHERE: RMC Research Offices, Portsmouth, NH (see below for more info)

This month's meeting will include a medley of topics related to Ruby on
Rails:

* Contributing to Rails and Rails Open Source Software Projects -
Including an Examination of ActiveSupport's Delegation Module (Nick Plante).
* Rails and Macromedia Flash Interoperability - Getting Started with
ActionScript and RESTful Resources (Nick Plante).
* Using the TabNav Plugin to Generate Tabbed Navigation for Your Rails
App (Scott Garman).
* An overview of screencast tutorial resources for Rails developers
(Scott Garman).

And feel free to join us for a beer in Portsmouth afterwards!

PLEASE NOTE, DIFFERENT DATE AND LOCATION

Starting this month, we will be meeting at the offices of RMC Research
in Portsmouth, NH. We will be meeting in their second floor conference
room, which includes free wifi access and a 62-inch plasma display for
presentations.

For a map and driving directions, see our wiki site:

http://wiki.nhruby.org/index.php/Upcoming_meetings

Also note, this month we are meeting on the second Tuesday of the month.
We will return to our normal third Tuesday of the month schedule in July.

Regards,

Scott

-- 
Scott Garman
sgarman at zenlinux dot com




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Penguin Day in Lowell, MA

[Shawn K. O'Shea]

Just saw this article on O'Reilly's ONlamp,
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/06/lowell_massachusetts_greets_op.html,
"Lowell, Massachusetts greets open source"

Apparently as part of a Grassroots Use of Technology 2007 conference
(http://organizerscollaborative.org/conference), the Organizers'
Collaborative has made Friday, June 22nd a "Penguin Day" event. This
wiki site is setup for information about the Penguin Day activities,
http://penguinday.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Lowell:Penguin_Day_Agenda

It's 60$ for the conference, and it's not clear to me whether that
includes/is required for the Penguin Day activities (at least not from
a cursory glance at the websites). Still I thought something fairly
close to home like this might be interesting to some folks, so wanted
to circulate the info.

-Shawn
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Free monitor

[Tech Writer]

I've got a Compaq 17" monitor, PE1160, that I don't need any more.  This 
monitor is only about four years old.  But, when I put CentOS on an old 
desktop, for some reason it didn't work with this monitor.  I had another that 
works okay, and this is just taking up space now.  If anyone wants it, and can 
pick it up here in Amherst, let me know.  Otherwise, it goes in the next 
recycle run.

Peg___
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