Fuzzy Logic

In my research I work with the Physics simulation software GEANT4.  It’s an incredibly detailed and realistic package, but it’s an absolute beast to get working.  A while ago one of my coworkers found this site and it makes it incredibly easy.  It went down a while ago, but you can find it at http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~skirkwoo/GEANT4-Kubuntu.html now.  I believe the old link is up as well, but the newer link is Dr. Kirkwood’s official site.  It’s a really great install and very valuable because it works on 8.04 (Hardy Heron), which is a Long-Term Service release.  The guide is for Kubuntu, but it works great on Ubuntu as well.

A quick note about using newer version of Ubuntu: From 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a g77 package. g77 is not used for GEANT4 specifically, but with CERN’s ROOT, which is an amazing statistical analysis package. You won’t NEED this for GEANT4, but it allows you to do some cool stuff.  Anyhow, instead of g77, Intrepid (8.10) comes with ‘gfortran’ which is not the same code, it seems.  Now, there are two ways on handling it.  I, personally, advise sticking to 8.04 and the g77 it comes with.  However, you can use a newer version of Ubuntu (or its variants) and either use Hardy packages or install from source.  Either way, it’s nice to have ROOT installed for statistical analysis.

As a side note, I’m hoping to (eventually) post a complete walkthrough of the process I go through when compiling CLHEP, GEANT4, and ROOT on a 8.04 machine.  It’ll probably be a while before I manage to get it written up, but it sure would be nice…

Just a quick fix for this problem–I’m more posting this for myself than anyone else.  Anyhow, if you have at one point installed the non-official Java package and then installed the sun-java6-jre package set, you may be missing some things.  The error I was getting was

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
Can't load library: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

The exact error being:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Can't load library: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1666)
at java.lang.Runtime.load0(Runtime.java:787)
at java.lang.System.load(System.java:1022)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1767)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1684)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:840)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1047)
at sun.security.action.LoadLibraryAction.run(LoadLibraryAction.java:67)
at sun.security.action.LoadLibraryAction.run(LoadLibraryAction.java:47)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.awt.Toolkit.loadLibraries(Toolkit.java:1610)
at java.awt.Toolkit.<clinit>(Toolkit.java:1632)
at java.awt.Component.<clinit>(Component.java:568)
at CreditSystem.main(CreditSystem.java:17)

The solution I found was to issue the following command

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

That will update your files and fix it. Fun fun…

Canonical released the Ubuntu 8.10 beta candidate last week.  As an avid Ubuntu user, I decided to give it a try on my T61 laptop.  I’m generally hesitant to upgrade to betas with Ubuntu–I’ve really never managed to have a flawless upgrade process.  I was determined, however, that today would be different!  So I fired up the Update Manager so I could update from 8.04 and prayed.

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So, thanks to Jeff Nadeau, I got hooked on WoW recently.  Unfortunately, I had a problem–How would I play this completely addicting game without the ability to play it on my laptop?  After all, the inability to play CSS/TF2 on my laptop with Wine was one of the big reasons I didn’t fail out of Engineering last year.  Luckily, after hacking at this for a few hours I managed a fix so I can properly lose all of my social life.

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I recently bought a pair of PCIe 7800GTs, made by EVGA.  My motherboard is an nForce4 A8N-Sli motherboard and had served me well until I attempted to install these cards.  When I tried to install these cards, however, the entire screen corrupted, flickered, and maxed out my system resources, making it impossible to install or do anything with the screen. Also, when I attempted to install the drivers the program would cause the computer to crash. To complete this solution, you need the following:

• Windows XP Pro (for the Remote Desktop capablities)
• Another computer on the network

The solution I found was this:

1. Visit nVidia’s driver website and download the new drivers
2. Enable RDP
3. Turn off your computer, install the new cards
4. Start up your computer.  You will experience lots of artifacting.  Just log on to your user’s account.
5. On the computer not in use, connect via RDP to the SLI’d computer.  Log in and take over the computer.  Install the drivers remotely.

If all goes well, this will solve your problem–I know it did for me.