TeX and Linux
As a physicist you learn how to deal with computers and how to program. Before college I started out with a Commodore C64. I took computer science classes the last 3 years of high school; we worked on Apple II e computers. If you believe or not, Pascal is a good language to learn programming...
At college in Cologne we had a 'big' computer for the students: a MicroVax running Unix (Ultrix). It was November 1990 and I was invited to be a superuser (sysadmin) on that computer in a team of eight. That's how I learned Unix. We had 8 Atari ST 512 (that is kiloByte of memory) as terminals, and at home I upgraded to an Atari ST 2M and a 20MB harddrive...
I also learned a typesetting program called TeX. It produces beautiful technical papers with professionally looking math. You can see for yourself, since almost all the papers that you can download from here are written in TeX.
In 1993 the WWW was invented and computers got more powerful. The MicroVax became several Sun Sparc stations. I bought an 486 (with an AMD CPU) and installed Linux 0.99.14f. Finally TeX processed my 15-page papers in a minute (the Atari took 15 minutes). I learned to appreciate the power of free open source software like Linux and TeX. I gained a lot of experience with this operating system and this typesetting program.
Between July 1995 and December 1997 I worked for the Computing Center, taking care of the program TeX (both links lead to German pages...). At the University of Missouri-Columbia I helped my advisor in all computer and TeX questions.
Linux links
Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Here are a few links:
- Wikipedia entry on Linux
- The Linux Kernel archive
- the Debian distribution (that's the one I use)
- the Ubuntu distribution (a Debian distribution with easy user interfaces)
- the Linux Documentation Project
- Mizzou Linux Users Group MLUG
- UCLA Linux Users Group UCLALUG
- Cologne LUG: Linux-Workshop Köln (in German)
TeX links
TeX is a free typesetting program written by Donald Knuth in 1978. The version number gets closer and closer to Pi and is currently at 3.1415926. Metafont is a program to calculate fonts for TeX and its version number get closer and closer to 'e' (the Euler number); currently it's at 2.718281.
Here are a few links:
- the TeX Users Group TUG
- the German TeX Users Group DANTE
- Download of TeX software through CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network)
- Wikipedia entry about TeX
- the TeX Merchandising project (calendars, soft toys, pins...)
- Donald Knuth's homepage