As mentioned in my previous post getting this printer to work was a bit of a hustle. Now on Karmic A64 I could not get it to work at all! Even though people in some german forum claim to have it working -but what i see there mentioned is the local version of the printer, not the networked version c1100n like I have- I could not get it to work that way, but they gave some good pointers.
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.
I just created a new entry on the thinkwiki with bits and pieces of information from previous ubuntu installation instructions and added some minor changes for the latest version of Ubuntu:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_9.10_%28Karmic_Koala%29_on_a_ThinkPad_T61p
After an upgrade to Ubuntu Koala Karmic (9.10) I noticed my songbird would not start, running it in the shell showed some gstreamer errors. Through a google search I found the solution:
export LD_BIND_NOW=1
/usr/share/Songbird/songbird
seems to fix the startup issues …
From time to time I also boot Windows which is still installed on a partition on my desktop. The Microsoft operating system does not have support for any Filesystems that are nowadays mainstream on Linux. I know you can access Ext2/3 with ext2 installable file system for windows but that does not help to access my XFS homedirectory on my desktop. As a workaround I was thinking to try and mount them with VMware running linux but since this did not seem to work a friend gave me the tip to try coLinux and this seems to be pretty easy:
- 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
Today there was a small crisis at home. My parents and sister came back from a week vacation and when they tried to copy the pictures from the trip on the -Windows- pc, all of the sudden they got read errors from the cardreader. Afterwards when looking at the SD card with another windows pc and the camera itself it was only possible to see 45 pictures on the card (While the total amount should be around 180). I put the cardreader in my linux pc and there I could see 155 pictures, already better than 45 but still no 180 (You could even see it in the numbering, there was a gap between 45 -coincidential or not the amount I could see on Windows- and 79, so still ~30 missing). So I went searching for recovery tools and found a nice (cross-platform!) tool called photorec, a tool included with testdisk which is free data recovery software, open source and gpl’ed. (On Ubuntu: ‘apt-get install testdisk’, this includes photorec) With this tool I was able to recover 145 pictures from the card (not all pictures, but the missing pictures between 45 and 79 were there, so in the end I got all pictures from the card). Now only to figure out what caused this weird behavior, the card itself or the “cheap” cardreader …
When installing the latest version of thunderbird lightning plugin (version 0.8) which can be found on the official plugin pages for thunderbird, you will notice that the screen looks all messed up. This can be solved by installing the libstdc++5 package. This is needed because the ubuntu developers compile against a newer version than the lightning plugin.
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
Just figured out that Imap on my gmail box stopped working and not only for my box, multiple people on IRC report the same. If you log in to the webinterface of gmail the “enable Imap” option is gone too. What is going on Google?
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 …
Nice link with some open source alternatives for much used Windows programs: open source as alternative
Another similar list: The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives
These 2 reminded me of this project started by a guy on the newsgroups already few years ago, the site seems a bit abbandoned but still a nice overview: Open Source for Windows
As so many people already posted bits and pieces of their visit, here also a short overview of my visit to Fosdem 2008:
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!