Archive for June, 2006
Brother HL-1440 and CUPS
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux on June 27th, 2006
I just finished a major battle trying to get my Brother HL-1440 laser printer working in cups. Apparently, many people who tried it had no problems at all. I, however, had nothing but problems. I didn’t have a problem detecting the printer, either directly connected to my Debian computer via USB, or via an SMB share to my wife’s Windows XP computer.
The problem came in when I tried to print. Every now and then, I’d get a perfect printout. But normally, I’d end up with problems. Sometimes it was garbled text, sometimes it was major margin issues, with top, left and right margins being off by as much as an inch. Other times, about half the page would print, then the printer would just stop. I’d hit the Continue button on the printer and it’d eject the piece of paper, but never finish the print job. The worst was when the printer would print a single line of garbled text at the top of 45 sheets of paper.
This problem actually followed me on two different computers, one running Debian Sarge, the other running Ubuntu Breezy/Dapper. I tried every possible printer definition file for the HL-1440, and even tried some of the files for the HL-1450. I had finally admitted defeat, and have just been printing to an HP Photosmart P1000 that I have attached to my Debian fileserver via USB. That works, both locally on the Debian machine and shared to my Ubuntu machine.
Every now and then, though, I decide to waste an hour or two trying to get this printer working. I had one of those days today. And as I was googling for assistanec, I came across a post on the Ubuntu forums regarding installing a Brother MFC210C in Ubuntu. And damned if that didn’t solve my problems!
Basically, the solution is to download the lpr drivers and the cups wrapper for the HL-1440 from Brother’s Linux driver website. Then you run the following set of commands (modified from the post on the Ubuntu forum):
sudo mkdir /var/spool/lpd
sudo mkdir /var/spool/lpd/hl1440
sudo dpkg –install hl1440lpr-1.1.2-1.i386.deb
sudo dpkg –install cupswrapperHL1440-1.0.2-1.i386.deb
Then came the last snag: the Brother drivers don’t just install Brother’s ppd file, they also actually create a cups device for the printer. So instead of trying to manually add a new printer or having the system detect a new one, you refresh your current list of printers. And *poof*, there’s the HL-1440. A few modifications (changing the source from USB (the default) to SMB share, for example). I did a test page, a print of a small text file, and a multiple-page test. All worked flawlessly.
There’s one more to scratch off my list!
7 Deadly Sins of Email
Tetsou’s article regarding the “7 Deadly Sins of Email amused me, because I am guilty of at least a couple of the sins. Email is not my strong point. I prefer to stay in touch with people via email, but I am notoriously bad at actually replying to email. So the seventh sin
7. Failure to respond in a timely fashion
I was recently sent an email from an Internet consultant who wanted to buy a domain name from me. I wasn’t using the name at the time and promptly replied that I would be willing to sell at a reasonable price. Several days went by and I heard nothing back. I checked my email account to ensure that everything was working fine, which it was. After a few weeks, I came to the conclusion that the consultant had rejected my offer and so I sold the name on. Imagine my surprise when I heard back from the consultant agreeing to the price! I regretfully informed him that he had missed the boat. Avoid this sin by being diligent and responding to client and customer emails in a prompt and timely fashion. Your customers will thank you for the courtesy.
For anyone who’s sent me an email, then gotten annoyed because two or three months have passed and I haven’t answered, fear not! I will answer your email. Eventualy. I don’t think I’ve ever gone a year without answering an email. But I’ve definitely come close.
WTF? “Tor: Freedom for whom?”
David ‘cdlu’ Graham apparently was trying to make some kind of point about freedom or privacy or… well, I have no idea what his recent post on NewsForge (“Tor: Freedom for whom?”) was trying to say. See if you can parse this bit:
Schneier states that the debate is wrongfully categorised as a debate between privacy and security. I agree — it is not privacy versus security, it is privacy versus freedom. When one person’s privacy restricts someone else’s freedom, we have a problem.In the real world, every country has a legal system with a set of rules by which everyone must live. If someone breaks one of those rules, a police force and judicial system exists to prevent them from continuing to do so. In some cases, the rules are unjust, but generally, rules are designed to protect the freedoms of others. Take the police force and judicial system out of the equation, and you end up with anarchy.
That’s what Tor brings to the Internet. If everyone on the Internet used Tor, and no one could figure out where anyone was coming from anymore, the Internet would be a complete anarchy, even though most people would still attempt to continue their normal, honest behavior.
Whatever point Graham was going for, I think he’s 100% wrong. It is not Tor’s fault that some internet services rely on IP addresses for security. They shouldn’t. IP addresses are spoofable as it is. It is up to those internet services to figure out security models. Tor has a legitimate use: provide privacy.
Ubuntu Dapper Drake – no sound in Flash
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Firefox on June 24th, 2006
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I have been using Dapper for a few weeks now, and just noticed that I’m effected by bug #29760: “Sound does not work properly in Flash in firefoxâ€?. Don’t ask me how I’ve gone this long without noticing it. Anyway, Ricardo Pérez López posted a fix that worked for me:
I have this problem in my Dapper and my nForce2 audio, but I can solve it putting FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss” in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc, and using the autoaudiosink for gstreamer 0.10. I’m always using the snd_intel8x0 alsa module.
I wonder if the best solution is to put the following by default in any Dapper installation:
1. FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss” in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc (by now it’s set to “alsa09″)
2. The alsa-oss package installed (by now it’s not installed by default)
I didn’t bother changing anything for gstreamer; this was enough to get sound playing in Flash again. It does kinda torque me off that someone just decided, “Eh, let’s configure Firefox so it breaks Flash.” I would have preferred to have been alerted to the problem, and then been asked whether I wanted to live with it, or accept the change. Or better yet, had Firefox configured as Pérez López notes above, which worked without any problems.
YES!!!! YES YES YES YES!!!!! Futurama to return!!!
Posted by Biffster in Miscellany on June 24th, 2006
I am trying to control my enthusiasm, especially after being sucked by the false rumors that Arrested Development was gonna make a return on Showtime. But it sure sounds like Futurama is going to return!
When Katey Sagal visited The Late Late Show the other day, she told Craig that the show is coming back to Comedy Central in 2008 for at least 13 episodes (I was watching that appearance, too. Must have slept through that part). Don Kaplan of the New York Post confirmed this; his sources told him that all the primary voice actors signed new deals this week.
13 new eps! All the original voices! Futurama awesomeness. “Good news, everybody!”
An embarrassment of riches
My first hard drive was a 40mb hard drive for an Amiga 600. At the time I was thrilled to have so much space. How could I ever use up that whole capacity? Impossible, I thought. Absolutely impossible. Fast-forward 15 years or so. After the hard drive I just added to my system (and big thanks to the gPartEd LiveCD team for creating such a mind-bogglingly useful live cd), my main Xubuntu machine has a total of 480gb of hard drive space.
Back in the day, I would’ve never been able to comprehend a single gigabyte of data. But having just shy of a half a terabyte on my own personal computer?
My how the world has changed.
