gconf-editor

and change the setting desktop → gnome → interface → gtk_key_theme from “Default” to “Emacs”.

Keybard failure. Press F1 to continue, F2 for setup.

When I was at home, I could just plug in the keyboard and hit F1, but when I was trying to boot the computer remotely through wake-on-LAN, I was out of luck.

Turns out you can disable this in the BIOS (hit F2). On my Dell, it is under the “Standard CMOS features” section. You’ll find “Halt on …”, which was set to “All errors” for me. Switching this to “All but keyboard” disables the boot process checking for keyboard presence.

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

This gives me a list to pick from, and I can change to the system-wide Firefox or Opera, but ~/firefox/firefox is not in the list.

sudo rm /etc/alternativesx-www-browser
sudo ln -s /home/mpromber/firefox/firefox /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser

Links in xpdf didn’t open at all anymore, instead:

run-mozilla.sh: Cannot execute /home/mpromber/firefox/x-www-browser-bin

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-www-browser x-www-browser /home/mpromber/firefox/firefox 10

The last number is the “priority”, I have no clue what the value should be here. I tried 90, 10, and 1, and it didn’t make a difference as far as I could tell. In all three cases, ~/firefox/firefox is last in the list given by update-alternatives --config

Then …

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

… and pick the newly created ~/firefox/firefox entry.

However, trying to open links from xpdf again didn’t work (same error as above).

So then I just picked /usr/bin/firefox from the list in update-alternatives --config. Surprisingly, this works fine, opening a new tab in my running ~/firefox/firefox process (maybe it will open the wrong system-wide Firefox if I don’t have the right one running).

Advantages:

• Clear and intuitive layout
• Can import and export BibTeX references.
• Can export EndNote and RSS.
• Lets you manually edit BibTeX citation keys (unlike Connotea).
• Lets you upload a personal .pdf copy.
• Can automatically add a post from a number of publisher’s URLs, via a bookmarklet.
• You can also manually add a citation, in case it is not online (again, seems this is not possible with Connotea).
• The interface for searching your articles is intuitive and fast (for my handful of articles so far), and there’s a nice function for filtering by keywords (tags) either within your own library or for all articles.
• Haven’t tried the function for “groups”, but this could be nice for labs.
• It is free.

Disadvantages:

• It does not recognize doi.
• When I visit a publisher’s URL via the university library website, CiteULike is not able to extract information about that article, even though it can extract the information just fine when I visit the publisher’s URL directly (probably has to do with the library proxy servers?).
• It is not open source