a7p’s

I am using vim-latexsuite under Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it rocks - absolutely - after some bugfixing and configuration. Had to spent some time in the sources and in a couple of mailinglist till I got it running. After all it was simple, but it took some time to find out the magic words strings.

First of all, in 20060325-4.1 the Ubuntu-version has got a bug (LP: #225411) - it just won’t work out of the box. You’ve got to either set some symlinks manually or apply the patch - I applied the patch.

$ sudo patch /usr/share/vim/registry/vim-latexsuite.yaml < vim-latexsuite.patch

Now you can activate the addon for your users vim via $ vim-addons install latex-suite. Vim-latexsuite should work from now on. If you want spellchecking, get your languages dictionary by :setlocal spelllang=<langkey&gt; (in my case de) - vim will ask you if it should download the needed files. Afterwards set spelllang to whichever languages you want, I choose spelllang=en,de_20 (looked it up in the vim-help, which is excellent). You might want to put that in your .vimrc as an autocommand for some filetypes - may be for tex-files.

Now I wanted just two more things:

1. forward searching
2. reverse searching

You can actually have quite some work to enable this functionalities, but you do not have to. It is all done by setting two (2) global environment variables in vim (it only works properly in gvim this way, but since you have to use xdvi to display the dvis that should not be a problem).

let g:Tex_CompileRule_dvi=’latex -src-specials -interaction=nonstopmode $*’
let g:Tex_UseEditorSettingInDVIViewer=1

These two in your .vimrc should do the job, no manual server setting, etc. I had to read a bit of vim-latexsuite source to find out.

If this should not work for you (may be, because you’ve already messed up your system in some way) here a bunch of links that gave me the direction:

• vim-latexsuite, the home of the project
• vim tip #225: a way to get it working (with more work and less comfort *g*)
• Inverse Search with Xdvi(k) the xdvi-project about its’ inverse search functionality
• … about 30 other pages and blog-entries that were a little helpful.

This year for the first time, I was able to visit the German “LinuxTag” every single day and I must say, I am a bit disappointed. Surely, I heard a lot of good speeches, but I wanted more - most of the stuff was not very technical.
My impression is, “LinuxTag” lost some of it’s magic, might be that’s because many projects choose other events as their main meetings. And with German being the main conference language it was pretty uninteresting for an international audience.

It was not (truly) boring and I significantly improved my vim configuration *g*, got (false) information on some LaTeX-options, felt competent and spend very much money on food and caffeine.

The best speeches I heard where about Modsecurity and PosixCapabilities.

It’s very likly I will visit LinuxTag again next year, but I will see it more like a nice trip to the capital - visit friends, museums and enjoy the beautiful parts of the town.

PS: Jono’s a true community specialist - he knows his buissiness - I decided to take a leaf out of his book.

The Fritz!Box mentioned above is now capable of receiving Fax-Messages and forward them as Email-attached PDFs - Nice!

… afraid of GRUBing your Computer? Try Wubi - install, and run Ubuntu just like any Windows application. This is really a nice alternative to VirtualBox for those who want to start soft.

Here comes the New Launchpad podcast actually there already two episodes online (here is the second one) - hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Just took another look at bzr-eclipse … and I’m feeling lucky - it works. And Eclipse with PDT got a lot faster since 3.1 … sometimes live is beautiful (until you read about JavaScript-Flash-Webhacks, Earthquakes and Hurricans … but somehow live is still a bit beautiful).

Just took a short look at the current Miro trunk … looks very promising and is a lot faster than 1.2 (which is hardly usable on my laptop). So, check (out) the trunk, report the bugs, polish the Miro.

… till now I found two:

• Noserub uses PHP/MySQL
• insoshi uses RoR

Haven’t tried any of them till now … but I will keep collecting and have a (very) close look at them (not so very) soon.

UPDATE: Someone asked the same question and got a bunch of answers.

Just read a very amusing (and german) open Letter to Mrs. Merkel concerning the “thing” which is called “Intellectual Property” by a lot of people.