Categories
Physics ROOT

Making Pretty ROOT Color Palettes

My friend and colleague (I like him even more since he told me about this!) Segev gave me this information, which he had gleaned from some old posts on ROOTtalk and a lot of experimentation. It’s a technique for setting the color palette of ROOT plots so that, for example, Graph2D with the “COLZ” option doesn’t look like total crap. I have no idea why something like this isn’t used as the default palette in ROOT.

In short, here’s before and after screenshots of the plot.

Default PaletteBefore
New PaletteAfter
Categories
Linux Physics ROOT

Building ROOT Packages on Ubuntu Feisty

I read with satisfaction the fact that Cern’s ROOT physics and data analysis framework has finally been integrated into Debian. I assumed that this would lead to easier installation on Ubuntu and in the future, hopefully, ROOT in the Ubuntu repositories. For a brief and happy period there was a third party repository with up-to-date and semi-official ROOT packages.

My hopes were dashed with the news that the Brookhaven machine hosting the repository lost a hard disk and the Ubuntu repository was down. I frequently need access to ROOT packages, so I just recently built .debs from the lastest stable release (5.16.00). Here’s a guide as to how to make it work:

Categories
Linux

Creating a RedHat 7.2 VMWare Image

Update: I have created a CentOS 2 virtual machine image for
VirtualBox which is available for download

I’ve created a VMWare image of a RedHat 7.2 operating system. I need one for compiling and testing programs since a cluster that I sometimes use runs this aging OS, and programs that I compile on my Ubuntu laptop or the Fedora Core 6 server at the lab don’t work properly on that system.

I would love to redistribute the base image for other people who might require it but unfortunately Red Hat’s trademark protection policy prevents this. I don’t have time to go through the image and remove all the trademark-covered files, so here’s a quick guide to getting a useful system in a short time. By useful, I mean with Subversion, GSL and Boost libraries.