A quick follow-up on my first impression with Scanning under Linux …. If you are fed up with the insanely ugly and incomprehensible GUI of xsane, try skanlite. It is quite a bit better. At least for me:

skanlite -d hpaio:/net/Photosmart_C5100_series?ip=192.168.10.10

For sending faxes I recently discovered SipGate. With the drivers provided here you even get native Linux integration via cups. Nice.

And with the awesome PDF editor PDF X-Change Viewer you don’t even need to print out your forms any more. Stamp your signature on it, save and off you go.

And yes, these are personal notes as well.

QDL is a set of python script for the automatic download of current quotes for funds, shares etc. from websites. The results are mailed to the user perodically and can be imported in to quicken etc.

Version 0.4.1 is a maintenance release where some updates to the python drivers are incorporated. The perl dirvers are stiff there yet are no longer supported.

Getting the HP Photosmart C5180 fully working under Windows, the natively supported OS, was nothing for the faint of heart. This is especially true for my setup, where the printer is accessed via wireless and is running in a different private 192.168.x.x subnet compared to my computers.

In contrast, under linux, getting the printer to work was a peace of cake. Enter the IP, select the printer type, done. Finished. That’s it. For the three times I needed a scanner in the last three years, I reverted to my spouse’s laptop. Well, up to now that is.

Today, ten minutes later brought me a fully working setup. How? Simple, use the hp-lib tools provided by Ubuntu by default. In a first step, you need to create an URI for the printer which is then used by xsane. For this purpose use the hp-makeuri command as explained here

hp-makeuri your ip

This gives you an uri under which xsane can access the scanner. For this to work properly, add the hpaio driver to your /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, see here.

Once this is done, you can access the scanner with an URI as follows:

xsane -p hpaio:/net/Photosmart_C5100_series?ip=192.168.10.10

PS: And yes, this is also some kind of personal documentation.

Update to Ubuntu Hary:
– do this: http://niftybits.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/andlinux-with-hardy-heron/
– and addd to rc.local, see http://www.andlinux.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=130&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

Personal note

If you want to install a package that is only available in 32bit use the following option:

dpkg -i –force-architecture skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

Update:

64bit is so really shiny brand new and totally unknown how could you expect to have java plugins and flash for firefox? The java bug is only 5 years old, man…. Otherwise see this Howto. No window icons though.

Ever tried to print multiple copies of a document with an uneven number of pages duplex? A couple of days ago, I did. On a HP Color Laserjet 3700 the results were nothing but disastrous (on windows also, btw 🙂

First I used the drivers recommended by the KDE print configuration utility, namely Postscript and Postscript + foomatic. Results?

• With the default Postscript driver the collate function does not work i. e. the printer churns out 50 copies of the first sheet of paper followed by 50 copies of the second sheet followed … you get the drift.
• With foomatic collate works yet there is the issue that all copies are added to a single document before being sent to the printer as duplex print job. For a 3 page document and 2 copies you end up with pages 1-2, 3-1, 2-3 hence making every second copy unusable.

The cups website and forum mentions some details about certain ppd-commands (cupsEvenDuplex and OrderDependency) to avoid the second behaviour yet there is no way to set these config options as end user. Editing the ppd files in /etc/cups/share wasn’t successful either.

The solution? Just use the plain old generic postscript driver! Tested as a last approach to the problem, this drivers works as one expects it.

Another issue with the newest Ubuntu 8.04 release – VirtualBox is broken. Why? The usbfs file system is removed from fstab yet VirtualBox relies on it.

Get it back by adding :

  none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=1001,devmode=664 0 0

to your /etc/fstab and running:

  mount /proc/bus/usb

as root.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS aka Hardy is out and – surprise, surprise – ships with Firefox 3.0 Beta 5. A beta version in a final release???

Well,

there might be certain reasons to ship a beta version with the 8.04 release as mentioned in the release notes. Yet, most of my extensions giving me a browser that is supposed to be better yet fails in many aspects provided by these extensions.

So, back to Firefox 2.0 via:

  apt-get remove firefox-3.0
  apt-get install firefox-2

and – voila – all extensions are broken in firefox 2, too. After some search on the web, this seems to be an incomaptibility in the extensions.rdf file in your firefox profile between Firefox 2 and 3.

So, if you struggle with this problem, remove the extensions.rdf file in your firefox profile directory and restart firefox 2 should solve your problem.