Local Configuration Information for Linux Machines

Local Hardware Configuration

• at least 32 MB of RAM
• at least 2 GB of disk
• a tape unit for backups. I had used a floppy-tape unit when at MIT, but now I've discovered that the Linux floppy-tape driver puts funny headers on the tape so that nothing except that driver can read it. Get a SCSI tape unit (the new Travan TR-4 drives are nice.)
• I swear by Northgate Omnikey 102 keyboards, but I cannot recommend them. Tech support is nonexistent, and the latest revision (programmable keyboard) has a very buggy keymapper program. If you call Northgate and ask them to send you an upgrade disk, they will recommend that you try and find one of the older OmniKey models still in stock!! The nicest thing (besides the feel) about these keyboards is that it comes with extra keycaps so you can put the control key back where God intended it to be (to the left of the "A" key.)
• A CD-ROM drive. Most software packages these days are distributed that way.

Local Software Configuration

• We are using a number of Fortran tools to allow us to run large Fortran codes on our boxes. Visit the Linux Fortran Page for more information.
• XEmacs has become the default editor around here --- even I use it after having used the standard GNU Emacs for eight years. Very slick. Its online manual system is fully functional, unlike the info system in the the Slackware distribution of GNU Emacs. A nice mail program (VM) and newsreader (GNUS) is included with XEmacs. XEmacs has pull-down menus, icon bars for common activities, context-sensitive editing for C, C++, HTML, Fortran, LaTeX, you name it.
• We use the xmgr program for publication-quality plotting. If you want to try xmgr, be sure to pick up the binary distribution here, unless you have the Motif libraries installed on your system. The binary xmgr distribution has the Motif libraries already compiled in.
• The tob program is used in conjunction with my SCSI tape drive to make backups. The program takes some time to set up (lots of config files) but it is straightforward, and once it is set up, you can do a backup by typing only one short command. Supports full, incremental, and differential backups. It also includes the afio archiver, which is like tar, but better since it can recover from tape errors even when compressing. It can do this since files are individually compressed and added to tape, but header info is left uncompressed. tar, on the other hand, adds files and headers, then compresses the result. Tape errors cause gaps in the compressed data, so the decompression fails. With tar you lose all the files in the archive. With afio, you lose only the one file whose compressed data was corrupt.