Printers...

So I finally got round to looking into getting my printer setup and working.
It's a HP 3310 WiFi all-in-one jobby, nice machine. Only hope I can get it working under Fedora Core now!

I have switched off auto yum updates as on those occasions when my internet connection went down my computer would take ages to get going. Seems yum trying to connect (but failing) was the cause of the delay.

So run an update to make sure I'm up to date before looking to install printer gubbins.

Seems hplip is what I want:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149981

But before installing that, I think I'll check with yum that it doesn't know where to get it first:
[root@yeti ~]# yum whatprovides *hplip*

Seems yum doe know about hplip, results from aboove:
fedora                    100% |=========================| 2.1 kB    00:00    
adobe-linux-i386          100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00    
updates                   100% |=========================| 2.3 kB    00:00    
filelists.sqlite.bz2      100% |=========================| 5.8 MB    00:23    
hpijs.i386 : HP Printer Drivers
hplip.i386 : HP Linux Imaging and Printing Project
hplip-gui.i386 : HPLIP graphical tools
hplip-gui.i386 : HPLIP graphical tools
hplip.i386 : HP Linux Imaging and Printing Project
hpijs.i386 : HP Printer Drivers
hpijs.i386 : HP Printer Drivers
hplip.i386 : HP Linux Imaging and Printing Project

Of those, only hplip-gui.i386 was not already on my system, so added it (# yum install hplip-gui.i386).

Now to get the computer talking to printer using those packages.
Tried launching the GUI setup from the HP item in the fedora menu, but that failed with an error about su/sudo so figure it must be a permission thing. So rather than try and sort it properly, I return to the command line....

[dafoot@yeti ~]$ su -
Password:
[root@yeti ~]# hp-setup

That started a GUI that took me through the process and successfully printed a test page. It failed to detect my printer automatically though, but once I told the GUI setup the IP for the printer, the rest was straight forward.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

That was a mistake!

In my friggin about with the system to get DVDs playing (see previous post) it would appear somehow I've managed to break BBC liveplayer support :(

Flock also seems to refuse to accept that Youtube contains videos. Largely because it hasn't figured out how to play flash content...

Found a new headache...

DVDs!
Something that is taken for granted by so many in Windows land looks like it may cause headaches in Linux land.

Apparently Linux distros don't ship with DVD playing software by default, something to do with regionality/encryption/copyright stuff.

There are plenty of players out there it seems though...

Totem (installed by default)
MPlayer
gXine (Gnome GUI version of xine)

...are all now installed on my machine, but still unable to play the DVD I have to hand (Red Dwarf). While trying to open the DVD for playback with command line mplayer I noticed a comment about something not being supported by the graphics card and causing it to die. So I aquired new graphics card drivers from ATI website (radeon 9600 card), installed painlessly and ran the auto config tool.

Now once X restarts hopefully I will be using the new drivers....or it'll all die horribly. See you on the flip side!

I've also now added Flock. A browser, based on Firefox with a bunch of extra bits and bobs. To get it working I needed to install and extra file with yum ([root@yeti ~]# yum install libstdc++.so.5) and so now I can run Flock from /usr/local/flock/flock.

Not ideal, so a right click on the Gnome panel and a bit of input later and I have a working 'open Flock' button on my Panel. Just a shame Flock didn't come with an installer that added it to menus etc for me.

Finally sorted BBC media player

My Fedora Core 8 was refusing to player the BBC radio feeds as I like to do.

Rather than fighting with the Windows Media format and getting mplayer working as a browser plugin I went for the Realplayer approach. Mostly because I've associated Realplayer with streaming media longer than I have WMA.

So after a little googling for answers I came across a tutorial here...
http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f8-tips.php#rplayer

Only difference being where the tutorial talks about removing mplayer-plugin files I removed the lib-totem files instead (that was the player Firefox tried to open the media stream in without success).

Didn't work at first, but a quick Firefox restart and I can now play BBC radio live :) Not tried the listen again shows yet, but I can't see it'll be a problem. Unless the BBC use a different format!

Gimp, UFRAW and ARW

Lots of strange names, al about cameras and photography this time.

ARW is the file extension given to RAW files from my A100 Sony camera. On windows I was using a free image editor called Gimp and seeing as it came bundled with my Fedora 8 installation it seemed sensible to continue using it on Linux.

I was using a program called UFRaw to read the ARW(RAW) files and import them into gimp, but this wasn't included in the distro so need to retrieve it.

# yum whatprovides ufraw

Produced no results, turns out the freshmeat rpm repository wasn't working, so add enabled=0 to the appropriate file (/etc/yum.repos.d/freshrpms.repo) and try again. This time yum picked up ufraw so it was to be a painless install.

Checked with fedoraforum.org and it seems there would be a couple more packages I needed....

So, one yum install later (as root)...

# yum install ufraw ufraw-common ufraw-gimp

...and now when I double click an ARW file, Gimp attempts to open it succesfully (well, actually the UFraw Gimp plugin opens it, but who cares - it works :) ).

mp3s + phone

After discussing the mp3 thing with another Linux bod, I tried Amarok as that is what he was using to sync properly.

A quick play with it and decided it probably wasn't the approach I wanted, however in the process of following instructions somewhere online for using Amarok with the N95 I discovered the idea of telling the media player where the portable device is.

I wasn't expecting to have to do this as Windows software would generally figure it out for you. Anyway, /media/N95_storage_card was added to the Rythmbox config and away we go.

Still don't get syncing, but rather I connect the phone and do the following:
1. create a playlist of tracks I want on phone
2. select the playlist in the left pane of Rythmbox - this displays the mp3s on the right
3. highlight all the listed mp3s and drag on the device/N95 icon on the left pane
4. wait....

First time I did this a progress indicator started. I unplugged the phone after 100% but only got half an hour of music on my phone. I guess that progress indicator was a progress made in queing the tunes rather than actually transferring.

So while I haven't actually got a load of music on my phone yet, I do think I know how now :)

Today I discovered to wonderful world of customising the panels in Gnome. So after lots of fiddling and panels everywhere I've got something behaving in a way I like. Lovely.

I'm easily distracted! The original aim was to get the music player (Rythmbox) to write to an external media, namely my phone, so I can easily dump a load of music on it before heading out to gym or whatever. Not as easy as I had hoped. While I've got RhythmBox managing all my mp3s and fiddled about with playlists etc I dont seem able to get it to write them to the phone.

Fedora recognises the phone and pops up the explorer window quite happily so that's not the problem... it seems this audio manager/player can't write tracks to an external device. That can't be right?!