MadBuntu

Part 1 Installing Kdar

Kdar Splash Screen

We all are terrible about backups.  Admit it.  You haven’t done a backup in a while.  I hadn’t either.  That is until I discovered Kdar and fell in love.

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Ubuntu will occasionally run a filesystem check every 30th (or so) bootup. Usually that happens when I am working on something, and don’t want to wait. But I also like to make sure my disk is error free, so I will occasionally run it manually. The gotcha here is you should NEVER run fsck on a mounted file system. But a simple command can cause a fsck run on the next reboot:

when the machine restarts, it will run fsck.

A while ago, I wrote up a piece on how to install a Dell 720 Printer in Ubuntu. Last weekend, after a reinstall of Linux, I found my printer didn’t work. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just follow my own tutorial”. To my absolute horror, when I tried to do it, it didn’t work. So I started sifting through the message boards, and found alot of old info that didn’t help. Finally, I was able to get everything squared away, so without further ado, here is the updated and correct Howto for installing a Dell 720 Photo Printer under Ubuntu 7.10.

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df shows you the free hard disk space on your system. df -h will show the information in a more readable format (ie MB or GB instead of blocks).

xkcd - brilliant as usual

One of the few windows programs that I really miss since I switched over to Ubuntu is IrfanView. I’ve yet to find anything that works as well as a general purpose image viewer and lightweight editor. Usually wine would take care of that, but it didn’t seem to install.

Once I sat down and looked at the output of the errors though, it was pretty apparent that it was just missing a library called mfc42.dll. A quick google search for the missing library and then dropping it into ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ and the program installed and ran without a hitch.

If you get a message when you try to run something through wine that says “failed to reserve range: xxx-xxx” try following the instructions here. Fixed it for me.

While I was setting up Timevault, I noticed something really weird. When I added a application to start on login (System->Preferences->Sessions), it showed up as added, but was gone after I logged out and logged back in.

So when I ran it (gnome-session-properties) through the terminal, everything added fine, but I got this error in stdout:

Suddenly it all made sense. Somehow, the permissions on the autostart directory got messed up and it wasn’t allowing my to write to it. So the quickest way to change it is through the command line using chown and chgrp. Initially you can see the permissions on where the start up files are kept (~username/.config/autostart) are owned and writeable only by root.

Here is how we change that :

You must have sudo permissions to change file ownerships.

Here are some pages for chown and chgrp for more detail on those commands.

I finally got rid of the little Dell 720 printer I’ve been using.  It did kind of a crappy job, was slow and the ink ran out fast and was expensive.  So the other day I bought a big whopping multifunction laser printer from Brother.

Brother actually supports Linux, so we can get the drivers which is nice. The scanner setup was easy as well and I have included it at the bottom. When you install your 7420, Hardy will detect it and set it up with the wrong printer drivers.

All you need to do for it to work correctly is got to Brother’s web site and download the Linux drivers.

Printer

First get the LPR driver here - Get the Debian Driver

Then get the cups wrapper here - Get the Debian Driver

Now open a terminal and go to where you downloaded the two drivers.

Install the LPR driver FIRST with the dpkg command :
sudo dpkg -i brmfc7420lpr-2.0.1-1.i386.deb
Now install the CUPS wrapper with the dpkg command :
sudo dpkg -i --force-all --force-architecture cupswrapperMFC7420-2.0.1-2.i386.deb

If dpkg complains, you may need to create a missing directory.

Now you should have a printer called MFC7420 and it should work just fine!

I have not tested the scanning portion yet, but I will and let you all know when I do.

Scanner

To get the scanner working all you need to do is download the scanner driver from Brother:

Make sure you get the correct one (which was the brscan2 32bit Debian file for me).  Get it here.

Now install it with dpkg from the command line as well:
$ sudo dpkg -i brscan2-0.2.4-0.i386.deb

Now you should be able to open up xsane and scan away.

[Ed Note] Welcome to Command Line Quickies. These recurring shorts will introduce some command line tips that you may not know of but can be useful. As with any tool, this is only the most basic overview of the functionality of the command covered. More information can be found by typing “man commandname” at the command line. [/Ed Note]

zgrep works just like grep, but for compressed files. This great utility will search zipped files for a string of text without you having to decompress it first.

So maybe you have created a twitter account and been playing around with it.  But you need more power then the tweeting from the web can give you.  You need to shorten URLs on the fly.  You need to customize the look of your client.  You need to be able to post to multiple account sat once.  You need Twhirl.

First we need to install AIR from Adobe.  Adobe AIR is a framework that allows web application to run as desktop applications.  Right now, Air is an alpha distribution for Linux, and some applications will only run on Mac or Windows, but Twhirl works fine.

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