new laptop with ubuntu 14.04

As I was getting worried about the chances of survival of my current laptop (bought in emergency upon my return from Kyoto!), I decided to use some available grant money to buy a new laptop without stepping through the emergency square. Thanks to my local computer engineer, Thomas, I found a local dealer selling light laptops with an already installed Ubuntu 14.04… And qwerty (UK) keyboards. Even though the previous move to Kubuntu 12.04 had been seamless, a failed attempt to switch a Mac to Ubuntu a few months later left me wary about buying a computer first and testing later whether or not it was truly Linux compatible. I am therefore quite happy with the switch and grateful to Thomas for the suggestion. I managed to re-compile my current papers and to run my current R codes, plus connect by wireless and read photos from my camera, hence validating the basic operations I primarily require from a computer! And reinstalled KDE. (I am still having difficulties with the size of the fonts in Firefox though. Which do not seem coherent from a tab to the next.) Enough to sacrifice a new sticker to cover the brand on its cover….

Merging bibtex files

Even though I strive to work with a single bibtex file for all my papers and books, using a symbolic link to the mother biblio.bib file in each paper directory, it happens now and then that local biblio.bib files get a life of their own! So this morning I cleaned up my computer by replacing all mutant biblio.bib files by the mother file, but I had first to make sure all local references had been included in this single file. There are certainly many ways to do so but I found using kbibtex, a bibtex editor for KDE, fairly painless and efficient.