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 really like Adobe AIR as a platform, mainly because I generally like the idea of having a platform that can run the same apps on any of the big three Operating Systems (Windows, Mac, Linux).  Unfortunately, after installing the Adobe Air alpha for Linux I was having a problem with an error every time I started up Filezilla.  This would popup on every startup:

"Can't open /usr/share/mime-info/air.keys" (error 2: no such file or directory)"
"Can't open /usr/share/mime-info/air.mime" (error 2: no such file or directory)"

Obviously, this wasn’t the worst thing that could possibly happen to me… but it was rather aggravating!  To solve this problem I went scrounging through the depths of the interblags and finally managed to fix it.  Lots of help comes from the Dusty Pixels blog, but I figured I would compile what worked for me here.

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