ThinkOrSwim on Fedora

I've been having the ThinkOrSwim blues. I run ThinkOrSwim on Linux. TD Ameritrade provides the platform for Windows, Mac and Linux, but they only provide support for Windows and Mac. Linux users are on their own.

I had an issue around the beginning of the year where ThinkOrSwim stopped working and I eventually called them asking for help. I knew the answer, but I just wanted to confirm that the problem was on my end. I eventually figured it out, and I thought I documented it, but I guess I didn't, because I was definitely reinventing the wheel this go around.

So here's the deal. I said earlier that it's supported for Linux. I do believe that's what their webpage said originally said, but now it is more specific--Ubuntu Linux. And today, in order for SinkOrSwim to work, you need to have the Zulu OpenJDK 11. Therein lies the rub.

One--I am not running Ubuntu, I am running Fedora. I don't know what packages Ubuntu is currently on, but the whole reason for running Fedora in the first place is because of the bleeding edge packages, so it's a safe bet their ahead of Ubuntu. They've been on Java 17 for some time. I'm pretty sure that was the problem before. Fedora moved to Zulu 17 and I had to downgrade back to 11.

So I ran a dnf list installed, which was a lot, so I piped it to a file and looked at it in kate, and I saw that I still had Zulu 11, so initially I was stumped. I've learned that the best thing is usually to come back to it later or the next day, since nowadays I don't usually have a lot of time to troubleshoot before I'm off to the next thing. So today I went through the whole list and saw java-17-openjdk-headless.x86_64. That was the culprit. I installed java-11-openjdk-headless.x86_64, but that didn't work. I had to remove the Java 17 version first, and then install the Java 11 version, so that the dependencies would be correct. Now everything works. 

And then I move to Schwab in less than a month. Hopefully everything is still good.

PDF fun

So I needed to create scan a 2 page document into .pdf format.  I went up to the computer that the scanner is connected to and scanned the document unto a multipage .tiff file.  Then I went downstairs to my laptop and copied the file.  Immediately afterwards, I realized that I'd skipped a step.  Usually, I convert the .tiff file to .pdf on the upstairs computer, using IrvanView.  My laptop is running Fedora, so IrfanView is not an option.  The solution?  A command-line program called tiff2pdf that I learned about here.
Once I looked at the finished .pdf, I realized I'd scanned the documents landscape--my only option--but the document is actually a portrait document.  How could I go about rotating it?  Irfanview?  Probably, but I didn't want to go back upstairs.  I've used pdftk for merging .pdfs, but wasn't sure if it could rotate files.  As it turns out, it can!
Once that was finished, I remembered something else: I was supposed to number the documents.  I didn't want to write on the documents themselves, and I didn't want to copy the documents and then rescan them either.  I was thinking that IrvanView would have been my best bet--I could have added the numbers in the editor before exporting to .pdf.  If only there was a way to add a watermark to a .pdf.  As it turns out, pdftk can do that too!  But then, the watermark itself needed to be a transparent .pdf, and I had no idea how to do that.  I found the answer here:

convert $INPUT.PNG -transparent white -background none $OUTPUT.PDF
pdftk $FORM.PDF stamp $OUTPUT.PDF output $COMPLETED_FORM.PDF

Coming full circle

So...CentOS didn't last long.  About a week.  The problem was that there just weren't that many packages available.  I wanted to run a tracker, but there were no trackers available in the CentOS repositories.  I found that one of them would run in Wine, so I went to install that, and it wasn't in the CentOS repositories either.  I rarely use Wine, but when I realized it wasn't available that's probably when I started thinking I'd chosen the wrong distro.  So...I'm back to Fedora.  And the same fix I used to get wireless working in CentOS worked in Fedora, so no need for ndiswrapper and the frustration of having to reconfigure everything after every kernel upgrade, which is what drove me from Fedora in the first place.

Centos

So yesterday I made the abrupt decision to make the jump from Kubuntu to Centos.  My linux experience actually started with Fedora five years ago, but eventually I abandoned it because everytime the system updated stuff broke.  Specifically the wireless.  This time things weren't quite so bad, thanks to instructions that I found on this page.