Math Lab FAQ

If you have questions that you think should be included here, please email them to guichard@whitman.edu

Linux questions and answers

How do I change my password in the lab?

Use "kpasswd" in a command window.

How do I log in to the lab remotely?

We have turned off telnet and ftp access to the lab to increase security. You need to use ssh and scp or sftp instead, which protects your password. Mac OS X and Linux include these programs; free and commercial versions of ssh, scp and sftp are available for Windows. If you have a standalone ssh program, you can connect to any of the lab machines from campus, not just the one named "math". If you are off campus you can only ssh to math.whitman.edu. A good ssh program for windows is PuTTY, and a good sftp/scp program is WinSCP.

TeX questions and answers

TeX is telling me I have an 'overfull box'.

Faced with the prospect of either putting too little on a line or too much, TeX puts too much and warns you about it. If you view the output, you should see a line that runs into the right hand margin; it will also be marked with a thick black bar in the right margin (you may have to scroll the view window to the right to see it). Sometimes the problem is that you have done something genuinely wrong; for example, if you accidentally put too much stuff in math mode (between dollar signs), TeX may not find a good place to break the line, because TeX tries to avoid breaking a line in the middle of a formula. At other times, it may be that a long word or mathematical formula happens to occur right at a desirable place for a line break. In this case you can usually rewrite the sentence slightly so the line can be accommodated. It may also be that the long word can be hyphenated, but that TeX doesn't know how to do it. In this case you can insert information telling TeX where it is acceptable to hyphenate the word. Put '\-' at every place in the word that a hyphen is acceptable, like this: ab\-at\-toir. DON'T put hyphens without the '\' in the word, as they will be inserted no matter what.