XeLaTeX on a Mac

As I wrote a couple of hours ago, I am currently writing my thesis using XeLaTeX. In the process I have found that the MacPorts version of XeLaTeX seems to be broken when it comes to accepting/finding user-installed fonts. My LaTeX template needs a font called Fontin Sans that I have downloaded and installed into my "Font Book" on my Mac. After doing that the MacPorts version of XeLaTeX still couldn't find the font, so I uninstalled the texlive packages fro MacPorts and installed the MacTeX 2009 package instead. And now everything works :-)

XeLaTeX and Aquamacs Emacs

I have finally begun writing my thesis... or sort of anyway - I have definitely started playing around with a LaTeX skeleton for it :-P

My friend Clemens gave me the LaTeX template that he used for his thesis, and it creates really pretty documents so I definitely wanted to use it for my thesis as well. But, this template makes use of XeLaTeX, a LaTeX variant that supports use of Unicode and "modern font technologies". I found that I already had xelatex installed on my system; apparently it comes with the MacPorts LaTeX installation, but it did not work immediately in Aquamacs. There _was_ a XeLaTeX command in Aquamacs, but in the background it was calling pdflatex, which in turn went into some never ending loop using a full CPU core...

In order to fix that you need to do change the way the xelatex command is called in Aquamacs, as described here.

1. Open Aquamacs in LaTeX mode (by opening a .tex file).
2. Go the the LaTeX menu, choose "Customize AUCTeX", choose "TeX Command", choose "TeX Command List".
3. Navigate to the XeLaTeX command (just search for xelatex).
4. Alter the "Command" part of that section to "%`xelatex --synctex=1%(mode)%' %t"
5. Set the "How" part to "TeX-run-command".
6. Make sure that LaTeX, ConTeXt, and AmSTeX have been checked off in the bottom part of the section.
   
7. Save the settings (Ctrl+x, Ctrl+s as usual).

And now it works!

Scavenger Daemon - VMWare Fusion Image

I have just uploaded a VMWare Fusion 3 virtual machine image that you may use to tryout Scavenger. The image is a minimal Ubuntu 9.10 server install with Presence and Scavenger pre-installed - you can fetch it here.

Here's how you use it:

• Download and unpack the zip file.


• Open the VM in VMWare Fusion 3. When it prompts you the first time select "Take ownership", and the second time you must choose "I copied it".


• Login with username "scavenger" and password "scavenger".


• Go to $HOME/scavenger (i.e., "cd scavenger").


• Start the Scavenger daemon by issuing this command: "./start_daemon.sh"

Now you have a fully functional Scavenger daemon running. The Scavenger daemon is running from an SVN checkout, so you may update it to the most current version by issuing the command "svn up daemon scavenger_common" from within the $HOME/scavenger directory.

In order to make the daemon running within the VM discoverable you of course have to configure the networking options to fit your environment. I think it is set to use bridged networking at the moment, which should fit in most circumstances.

AugIm v. 2 released!

I have just released an entirely new version of my Scavenger demonstrator AugIm (The Augmented Image Manager). AugIm is now Maemo 5 only - and it is written in PyQt so you need to add the extras-devel repository in order to install it.

You can grab the demonstrator at Scavenger's Google Code page, or you could just use this direct link.

B.t.w., if you look in 'branches' in Scavenger's SVN you will find an alternative version of AugIm. This version does _not_ use Scavenger, so it may be used as a comparison to the fully-fledged, Scavenger-enabled version.

I have also created a VMWare Fusion image of a Scavenger daemon to make testing Scavenger easier, but I have yet to find out how to make such a VM distributable using Fusion... I'll probably link to the current Fusion-only image in the near future, and if I get the time I will try to create an OVF compliant version.