So I promised myself I wouldn’t put the most common blog entry I think there is on the internet by not writing about how I am sorry that I haven’t been blogging frequently and then make (most likely false) promises about blogging more (did I just fail at that?)
Anyways, I thought I would instead talk about the new Linux release of Ubuntu that I just downloaded and finally decided to abandon the dual boot world of Windows/Linux for my laptop and instead just use Linux exclusively.
I had effectively been doing this for the last year, but always had the safety net of being able to boot in windows if necessary. Now, after a glowing experience with Ubuntu Linux I went completely without a net into this new release!
Previously I was using Ubuntu 10.04 and was very pleased. As a member of the high energy physics community I was really pleased to see that the Ubuntu community had included CERN’s program ROOT as part of their software center! For those of you outside the physics world ROOT is THE FUNDAMENTAL PROGRAM used by physicists for just about everything we do. Without ROOT, we would likely be using an abacus and graphing paper.
Needless to say I was disappointed in the new version not to find the same convenience ready to install ROOT with a “click of the mouse”. However, unlike when I was a young grad student, the installation process has become much easier and better documented. Thusly, I was surprised when ROOT complained that I didn’t have a library installed (X11 for those that care) despite me explicitly following the well documented instructions on their page (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/). What I realized is that the libraries did in fact exists just not where ROOT was looking for them. Once I found this I made a series of softlinks (computer jargon for pointed the computer to where to look) and things ran swimmingly!
I thought I’d post the libraries that gave me issues in case there was anyone out there in the physics world considering changing brands of Linux and wanted to give Ubuntu 11.04 a whirl (Because heaven knows we can’t have a machine and NOT have ROOT installed)
jasaadi:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so /usr/lib/libX11.so
jasaadi:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 /usr/lib/libX11.so.6
jasaadi@jasaadi-Inspiron-1420:/usr/lib$ locate libXft.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2.2.0
jasaadi:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so /usr/lib/libXft.so
jasaadi:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2 /usr/lib/libXft.so.2
jasaadi:/usr/lib$ locate libXext.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6.4.0
jasaadi:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so /usr/lib/libXext.so
jasaadi:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6 /usr/lib/libXext.so.6
