After a good few hours of poking around I found the problems … and worked around all of them with some -admitted unclean- hacks … but at least it works! You can find a package with all needed files and an install script here. Just unpack the package and run the install.sh script as root, then add your printer through the usual printer wizard.

For people interested in the details: the printer driver is 32 bit only, it needs libc6 32 bit, libgcc 32 bit and next to that it still relies on libstdc++5 which is not present (now they use libstdc++6) in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10. I fixed it by manually copying the needed 32 bit libraries from a 32 bit installation in the /lib32/ directory, getting the 32bit version of libstdc++5 from Jaunty and force install the 32 bit driver packages.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_9.10_%28Karmic_Koala%29_on_a_ThinkPad_T61p

export LD_BIND_NOW=1
/usr/share/Songbird/songbird

seems to fix the startup issues …

• install coLinux (see the wiki and docu) and make sure it can access the network
• add in the config file for colinux a line:

cobd2=”\Device\Harddiskx\Partitionx”
with x the harddisk number and y the partition number (both start from 0, just count the partitions, needs some experimentation perhaps …)

• under the linux image you can just mount it by

mount -t xfs /dev/cobd2 /mnt/mountpoint
and after that add it to your fstab file.

• share /mnt/mountpoint using samba (see plenty of howto’s if you don’t know how to do this)
• Now you can access your linux partitions through the colinux samba share

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Update: someone on IRC pasted a message from google apps (I don’t use those myself so i cannot verify this)

Your users may be experiencing issues accessing Google Apps services- As of 1:00:00 PM PDT on April 16, 2008
* Services impacted: Email
Our team is working quickly to resolve this situation as soon as possible. We will continue to post updates here as we learn more.

Update2: services have been restored it seems …

On Saturday I went to see the opening talks, I was really impressed by the “tux with shades” presentation, it was nice to hear that movie studios are completely switching over to/are running on Linux for creating special effects in movies. In the afternoon I attended a very enlightening presentation about SElinux on CentOS, I had already worked with it a bit, but never really had time to look how it exactly works. I had a short stop at the Mozilla dev room – dubbed sauna.fosdem.org because of the heat!- with a presentation about Thunderbird and to end the day a presentation about Dstat which looked also very interesting to monitor various server performance issues.

On Sunday I did the whole main track about virtualisation, the xen one was not that interesting since it did not go very technical and I had already seen a more in depth one last year. The virtualbox presentation gave a nice overview of the buildup and future development of the software and the openQRM presentation was interesting because it was my first encounter with the software, like Wonko already mentioned definately worth a look. In the afternoon I attended an LVM2 novelties presentation. Afterwards I attended the webscarab presentation: a proxy which enables you to inject code in GET and POST parameters in realtime. I will certainly test this one as security is also part of my job. And to end the day I attended the presentation of CentOS 5 virtualization – which contained actually more topics like how to fastly deploy virtual machines and maintain several of them at once. I had a very nice discussion about this afterwards with some CentOS developers which actually encouraged me more to try out puppet in the near future (not really in the talk, but according to what I read and they told me one of the best tools for mass-maintaining a lot of servers) .

I met a lot of acquaintances (and then to say some years ago I knew almost nobody there) and also got to know a few interesting new people. I’d like to thank the organisers of Fosdem for making it again a splendid event!