CMU Mathematical Sciences Department

Here are the solutions to small problems that make a difference and nobody wants to talk about. The files consist or contain binaries compiled for Redhat 7.3. Where binaries-only are provided, the sources were extracted from standard SRPMs and the changes were obvious. Don't forget to restore the permissions if you download an executable.

• Redhat 7 series lacks printer filter support for some common file formats. Here are filter configuration files for that purpose. These files should go to /usr/share/printconf/mf_rules/. No restart of lpd is necessary.
• mf42-xfig_filters for fig files created by xfig
• mf41-dvi_filters for dvi files created by Latex
• mf43-troff_filters for troff files (e.g. manual pages) . This filter needs the script gr.sh to be placed in /usr/share/printconf/util/
• mf40-pdf_filters for pdf files (Redhat 7.3 has already a pdf handling mechanism, so this is useful for pre-7.3)

• The good old mpeg_encode utility written in mid 90's cannot be compiled without some changes. This utility is the only reliable Open Source way of making portable mpeg movies out of  frames/images (FFMPEG is catching up). Scientific simulation results and many nice applications (e.g. motion, gspy) benefit of this utility. Here are modified sources and binaries for mpeg_encode and several conversion programs that work on Redhat 7.3 and probably on most of the other modern Linux distributions. To install the binaries (mpeg_encode from the mpeg_encode folder;  eyuvtojpeg, eyuvtoppm, jmovie2jpeg, mpeg_demux, and ppmtoeyuv from the convert folder) just copy them in /usr/local/bin. The manual pagempeg_encode/docs/mpeg_encode.1 should go to /usr/local man/man1 or /usr/share/man/man1.

• This gnome-login-check is compiled against Redhat 7.3's gnome-core-1.4.0.4-54.i386.srpm and will eliminate the time wasting warning when login as root. Don't you dare ask me what I'm doing logged-in as root in gnome :-)
  

• Afio is a very good archiving software that uses individual file level compression. This makes it more robust to media errors than cpio. Here is a modification of afio-2.4.7 that works with archives on disk larger than 2Gb. The package contains a binary for i386 compiled under Redhat 7.3. Afio's maintainer warns that the trick in this package works only on i386 platforms. A new release of afio may be out soon to support large files on other platforms.
  

• The normal behavior of the "cp" command is restored with this binary compiled under Redhat 7.3's fileutils-4.1-10.i386.srpm. The same binary can be used with the newer fileutils-4.1-10.1. With the above binary, the -i flag's effect is canceled by the -f or --remove-destination options. Historically this is the normal behavior of the above flags, and the new behavior under Redhat 7 series breaks scripts and good sense.