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Epson Stylus DX4000

Today I installed my brand new printer^Wmultifunction device: Epson Stylus DX4000. This is my second printer — few years ago I had Epson Stylus 200 by few weeks.

Device is nicely supported under Linux — printing via CUPS works without problems and there are lot of config parameters if someone want to tweak. Scanner works with SANE — I only had to add one line to /etc/sane.d/epson.conf to get it recognized:

usb 0x04b8 0x082f

To get it working under Debian following stuff needs to be installed:

• cupsys-driver-gutenprint (driver for printer)
• quiteinsane or kooka (scanning application)
• escputil (utility to printer managment)

Thanks goes to LinuxPrinting team for their website — especially for article about suggested printers.

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Debian + Firefox browser + me = Argh!

As I already wrote I switched to amd64 platform and reinstalled Debian on it. Everything works now… except Firefox.

Yes Firefox… I understand that Debian developers decided to not ship it due some licensing problems. But there was discussion about Iceweasel instead of it — too bad that it was only discussion ;( Today I have few possibilities:

• use Firefox 1.5.0.x which is old
• forget about Firefox and stick to Konqueror
• switch to Ubuntu which I do not want to do as I use Debian for years
• build Firefox 2.0 from source
• build Firefox 2.0 from Ubuntu sources

Probably will select one of last ones when will find some free time.

And Opera does not provide amd64 packages too ;(

UPDATE: I have Firefox 2.0 working now. To get it installed and working few steps need to be done:

• add experimental into APT sources
• upgrade libc6 and libgtk2 to ones from experimental
• fetch firefox and libnss3 libnspr4 from Ubuntu
• install fetched packages

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Goodbye x86

In last Friday I made architecture change — sold AthlonXP 2200+ which I used during last 3 years and bought Athlon64 3200+ with DFI RS482 Infinity mainboard. This is 3rd such change for me. First it was from 6502 (Atari 65XE) to m68k (Amiga), then to x86.

Most of time which I spent with computer during weekend was fighting with machine. I made backup of my previous Debian installation and decided to install Debian ’sid’ from scratch — of course for AMD64. Then I spend few hours to get fglrx driver working (will write more about it later). Now two problems left to resolve:

• get sound working (I have atiixp: codec read timeout messages which are known bug related to ACPI probably)
• get KDE working properly (Control Center list only one module but I have all of them installed)

But even with those problems I’m satisfied. Machine is fast (can be overclocked by ~25% if needed), I have faster gfx card then before (had Matrox G400 and Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440).

And now I have OE build running — building my own umbaumba distro for spitz.

Tags: amd64 debian 2 Comments »

RPM is Really Poorly Maintained

I created openembedded-essential package for Debian derived distributions which depend on all packages required by OpenEmbedded. It took me about 5 minutes to get first version working and 15 to get it polished. Resulting package depends on needed stuff and contain only own changelog.

Then I tried to create RPM version for all those RedHat/Fedora/Mandriva derived distros… RPM HowTo is from 1999 year and RPM 4.4.1 refuse to work with spec from this HowTo. So I started to dig for other manuals — found one from 2002, then some others. But still no idea how to build RPM package which DOES NOT have sources and/or patches — just pure dependencies and own changelog.

How does RPM based maintainers do their job? Thats probably a good question…

Tags: aurox debian openembedded rpm 2 Comments »

Reinstallation

Today morning my home machine does not boot properly (was working yesterday evening). I suspected XFS on rootfs and it was that. Booted into /bin/sh and started xfs_check -f /dev/hda1 followed by xfs_repair -f -d /dev/hda1. There were some problems but looks like it solved them so I rebooted. Again system fscked.. Another boot into /bin/sh and another xfs_check/xfs_repair combo and again nothing.

Booted into single user and then SSH connection to other machine to get help on #xfs channel on freenode. ‘dtm’ suggested me to run badblocks on disc to check does hdd is ok. So I installed Debian ’sarge’ on my swap partition and started badblocks -v -n /dev/hda1 — 0 bad blocks found.

So I decided to reformat partition and reinstall whole system. Mounted old rootfs into /mnt/, chrooted into this to get list of installed packages with dpkg -l and archived whole partition with tar. Then umount, mkfs.xfs -f /dev/hda1 and restoring from tarballs.

Next step: apt-get install --reinstall all-installed-packages is in progress now:

Need to get 389MB/676MB of archives.
After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.

I hope that after this I will have working system again. System which will just works not like I had in last month when from time to time some files were missing from rootfs (kernel module or awk or other thing) but usually problem disappeared after reboot…

Maybe it is time to change something in machine — but how to find out what…

Tags: debian xfs Comments Off

Debian 13th birthday

It was 13 years ago when Ian Murdock announced his new Linux distribution.

My usage of Debian started in ’slink’ times. I chose it because there was no other maintained Linux distro for Amiga computers at that time (there was RedHat 5.1 available but it was unofficial build without any support). After few installations of ‘potato’ I updated some parts of ‘Short Amiga installation instructions’. Then it got released and I moved to ‘woody’ (which was ‘unstable’ then).

But usage of Amiga with 720×480x4 screen and VGA mono monitor was far from comfort. I decided to not upgrading and sold it. Next machine was x86 desktop powered by AMD Duron — ofcourse it was powered by Debian. I started to use ‘unstable’ on it and still use it (but hardware was replaced by another AMD x86 platform).

Few years ago I had a plan to became Debian developer but then I found OpenZaurus and OpenEmbedded projects and they are taking most of my free time spent on computer things.

Why I use Debian:

• because it is FREE
• it has many applications to choose from
• it support all my hardware (but I use own kernels anyway)
• if I want to hack something which is in ‘main’ I do not have to check license to know that I can

Thank you Ian for creating such nice distro, thanks goes also to all Debian developers for keeping it alive.

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