That is so PUNK ROCK!

Lexmark Wireless Printer (Prospect Pro205 and similar) Setup Tips

There's a driver for this series of printer on Lexmark's web site. The software provides both the print drivers and printer and wireless set up utilities as well as a management interface to see ink status and perform some operations (Those operations can be performed using the menu on the printer as well).

The installation is pretty straight-forward. However there are some issues:

• On Ubuntu, System/Administration/Lexmark Printer Toolbox brings up the management interface. However, the ink levels are not seen. This is because the administration interface is not running as root, however the original setup is done as root. Before we figure out which script/app needs to have its permissions fixed or which group your username should be in, the quick and dirty way to see the ink levels is to manually run the printer utility as root.

  sudo /bin/bash /usr/lexinkjet/lxk09/bin/.scripts/lexijtools

• Wireless setup will fail because the printer will not detect any wireless networks. You cannot manually connect to one (like you would when the ESSID is not broadcast) either. Here's the issue. There's a utility wsulist which takes the usb device name as a parameter. On my system it was using /dev/usb/lp which does not exist. The correct device is /dev/usb/lp0. Also, this utility wants to run as root so you have to start the main utility like in the above issue too. (Do not manually run wsulist. While it won't hurt, it won't help either. The utility has to run it and use it to provide you a list of available networks).

  Create a symbolic link to the actual device and start the utility:

  sudo ln -s /dev/usb/lp0 /dev/usb/lp
sudo /bin/bash /usr/lexinkjet/lxk09/bin/.scripts/lexijtools


  The wireless setup icon is at the top right corner. You can't miss it. It should show you a list of wireless networks and let you set one up. Follow the rest of the prompts. There are actually some pretty neat things going on there. One of them is adding a separate print queue for the WIFI (separate from the same printer being connected via USB) which it then adds as another available option in the printer utility dropdown.

• Scanner only works as 'root'. Edit /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules and find the line that reads SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0664". Change 0664 to 0666. Remove usb cable and reconnect it. It should now work. (Please note that this setting effectively allows EVERYBODY access to ALL USB DEVICES. I actually see nothing wrong with that at my home computer, so I will keep this workaround until I find a proper fix. This used to be handled by the 'scanner' group but that was apparently removed in karmic with nothing in its stead.)

Hint: If you select the name of the wireless printer queue in the Lexmark Printer Toolbox, the ink levels are shown there as upposed to the USB queue which requires root access.

Hint: At the end of the setup the network connections will be printed. Find the Address: line. You can put this on your browser and connect to your network print server. Please tell me if you find 'print queue' status information there.

PS: The installation utility actually asks for the 'root' password when it needs it. But a default Ubuntu install does not have a password set for 'root'. So I opted to run the app with 'sudo'. This might have caused some of the issues but I can't think how.

quick update Launchpad .po revision date (PO-Revision-Date)

Quickly mass update the PO-Revision-Date header in gettext archives (.po files).

sed 's/PO-Revision-Date:.*/PO-Revision-Date: 2010-02-14 10:09+0000\\n"/g' filename.po

This finds all occurrences (there should only be one) of PO-Revision-Date will sets the date to 2010-02-14 and 10:09 am.

From there one can employ find/xargs etc to repeat the same thing for a great number of files.

-i causes an inline edit (edits the same file in place without a backup). Without the -i flag output it sent to STDOUT from where you can redirect to another file

Alfresco on Ubuntu – CIFS (File Server) does not start. [Solution]

On Ubuntu (and possibly Debian), tomcat runs as the tomcat user which does not have privileges to start daemons on low ports. For this reason, the Alfresco CIFS server will silently fail when it attempts to bind to port '139'.

The solution is to edit, file-server.xml and uncomment the following section:

This will cause CIFS to mount to TCP port 1139 instead of 139.

To make things transparent to clients trying to connect, we have to forward all requests to port 139 to port 1139 seamlessly which we can accomplish using iptables.

I am using shorewall to manage my iptables rules, so I edit shorewall's 'rules' file and enter the following:

# samba/cifs
REDIRECT                loc     1139     tcp    139
SMB/ACCEPT              loc     $FW

Restart alfresco and shorewall and try to connect to the share as you would normally do. Enjoy!

How to re-run the CONFIGURATION script for software in FreeBSD Ports

Some of the software in FreeBSD's Ports provide a menu based interface to configure the package. For instance, when you're trying to install the curl package by typing make in the ports directory, the install has an option to use GNUTLS which you can select.

However if you do this without disabling OpenSSL, the port will fail to compile since these two options are mutually exclusive.

Sending files to Sony Ericsson K750 via Bluetooth on Linux

I just received my Sony Ericsson K750c (c denotes an Asian model). It's a pretty decent phone - apparently the best seller of the company last year. I decided to buy this model instead of a newer model because it uses regular memory stick duo (and pro duo) as opposed to the micro version that came out more recently. I thought it would be a cheaper to get a decent sized stick for this model and I was right. I just ordered a 2gig Sony one with MagicGate (I'm not mentioning because I'll use this, but to make price comparison easier) for around $70 from overstock.com. There's also better support for it on both Windows and Linux because of the relative maturity of the phone.

How to run multiple WordPress blogs on the same server using a single install base

Intro

I have two blogs. One is in Turkish Safsata.org, the other is this one, which as you might have guessed already, is in English. I wanted to find an easy way to maintain both blogs and keep up with updates and security fixes. Running two seperate complete installs would mean twice the effort so I decided to try and see if two domains can be run from one directory of source (that is, php source mostly) files.

There's already good documentation about a similar situation I found online. If it suits your needs, you should use that more complete solution.

Subversion umask tip

When using the subversion source control system with access methods other than apache2+webdav it's a good idea to create a seperate group and add all developers' usernames into this group.