New blog site

Posted in personal on October 6th, 2008 by Alain M. Lafon

Since my established lifestyle forced me to change jobs to optimize my income, there will be no more nice http://blogs.sun.com/preek

Fortunately I still have my own little Fire 280R / Solaris / 1GBit Server in the basement(;

In the days to come I will migrate relevant data from my old blog, since I don’t want to lose all my handy tutorials.

TexLive on Solaris 10

Posted in articles on October 4th, 2008 by Alain M. Lafon

TexLive is a very decent Latex implementation, however if you want to write DIN conformable letters using g-brief you might get an error message like that:

! LaTeX Error: Command \Telefon already defined.Or name \end... illegal, see p.192 of the manual.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.Type  H   for immediate help. ...

l.48 \newcommand\Telefon{\mvchr{84}}

This bug is in g-brief with newer versions of marvosym.sty. So all you have to do is edit line 48 of /texlive/texmf-dist/tex/marvosym.sty and uncomment it.

This bug might affect all unices, not only Solaris.

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Sun RAY with PS2 Keyboards

Posted in articles on October 4th, 2008 by Alain M. Lafon

SUN Ray with PS2 keyboards
If you want to hook up a Sun Ray at home, you might want to use your favourite old PS2 keyboard attached via some USB connector. Depending on your keyboard layout you might be disappointed by the result, because it will be standard US. That’s because the PS2 keyboard isn’t designed for the Ray clients and won’t prompt back a valid layout to the server which will then assume a standard scenario.
There is a simple solution to this problem; in the file “/usr/openwin/etc/keytables/keytable.map” edit the entry


6      0       US6.kt

and rewrite it to your favourite layout(British English in this case)

6       0      UK6.kt

There is one drawback however; from this point on this is going to be the single standard fallback layout for all keyboards hooked via SUN Ray clients to your server which won’t report a valid layout themselves. So if you want to use different layouts on different clients you might want to check the xkb option in “/opt/SUNWut/bin/utxconfig”, which I haven’t done until now.

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