There’s a petition going around asking printer manufacturers to support Linux with their driver base. This is a rather significant issue for making Linux a real desktop-replacement OS. Right now Linux is excellent at handling all of the various video/sound/networking interfaces that the hardware industry has thrown at it - but it’s seriously lacking in printer support.

I received a Canon i80 as a college graduation present from my grandmother. It’s a wonderful printer because it’s super-portable and prints high-quality documents quickly. The serious drawback is that I have to log into a Windows machine (or Mac OS X) to use it.

This petition has only 85 signatures so far but considering the need for printer support it could quickly become popular. It can only ever be a gesture because petitions don’t work unless accompanied by something with more bite to it, but I think it’s a good start.

If you’re looking to buy a printer or replace your current non-Linux printer, check out the Linux Printer Database. It’s a comprehensive (nearly) list of various makes and models of printers. You can check to see if the printer you’re considering purchasing has support for Linux.

This is one step closer to a full Linux desktop. As soon as we get better printer support we’ll be all that much closer to converting large offices to Linux.

Thanks to Yet Another Linux Blog for the scoop.

I’ve whined for some time now about the lack of support for my wireless card - the Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG - on Linux. It’s an increasingly popular piece of hardware because it’s part of the core of the Centrino system and is a stock part of many new systems being built by Dell and other large manufacturers. Besides being popular it’s also an excellent wifi card that uses low power and supports the 802.11b and 802.11g protocols.

The problem with this card is that Intel has only released binary drivers for it. It works beautifully on Windows, but any other system requires some sort of hacking of the driver. There’s a sourceforge project that seeks to hack this binary driver well enough to create open source drivers, but despite the hard work of the people who develop the ipw2200 driver for Linux there’s still a long way to go with the development.

what we can do
There is enough development in the ipw2200 project to get most of us off the ground and running. Suse 9.2 and onward, for example, has enough of an implementation of this driver to allow wifi networking as soon as it is installed.

Here’s what you’ll need (you may already have some or all of these installed)
Wireless Extensions and Tools
The IPW2200 Driver
The IPW2200 Firmware (firmware is software that’s on your hardware)

Some articles on setting up the drivers on various systems:
on Fedora Core 2
on Fedora Core 3
on Suse (older versions or for upgrading)
The IPW2200 Install Guide

remaining problems
There’s still a lot of work do be done on this driver. On Suse 9.2 (with the default driver version) there is the tendency for the whole system to freeze when there’s too much wireless network activity. The workaround is to make sure I’m set at 802.11a and I don’t use too many programs, but it’s still a very critical problem. If this is happening to you the best bet is to upgrade the driver and hope for the best.

Good luck getting your wireless cards to work. Please leave comments if you have any experience with this problem or are looking for more of a solution (comments only take a second).

If you have a digital camera, an mp3 player, or a usb pen drive then you’ll want to access your data while you’re running Linux. For iPod users I’ve already posted some information on getting your iPod working under Linux, but for the rest of us there’s some pretty basic stuff we can do to make sure that our usb drives work and play well with our computers.

If you’ve tried to use a usb drive in Windows XP you’ll probably have noticed that all you need to do is plug it in and it appears in My Computer the same way that a hard drive appears. This is because most modern usb drives use USB Mass Storage protocol that makes them interact with computers as usb hard drives. If you’re using a modern version of KDE or Gnome then you shouldn’t have to worry about this too much because there’s a good chance that upon plugging in your usb device it will be automatically mounted and an icon will appear on your desktop.

If that doesn’t happen for you either because you’re not using new versions of those desktop environments or because, like me, you fiddle with things too much and that particular feature has long been broken then you can mount this drive yourself.

accessing usb drives under Linux
plug in the drive
if you don’t have the folder “/mnt/usb” then go ahead and make it
mkdir /mnt/usb
and then mount the usb device
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb
now make a link to the device on your desktop
ln -s /mnt/usb /home/[username]/Desktop/usb_drive

Then you can access this usb drive just like a hard drive partition. Enjoy!

Matt Schick has given the world a gift today. Okay, so maybe that sounds a little dramatic, but this is something I have no idea how to do and I’m very interested in. He’s written an article on how to configure a RAID 5 array via mdadm.

The first hurdle was to figure out what chipset the SATA cards use, but after removing the SIIG sticker I found a nice SiI 3114 chip which is well supported via the sata_sil 2.6x kernel module. After enabling it in the kernel (CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_SIL) along with SCSI disk support and rebooting I got a nice trio of disc devices (/dev/sd[abc]) and was able to move on to partitioning.

My next desktop system will have an AMD 64 running Gentoo Linux with a RAID 5 array. I don’t know how long it’ll be until I get it, maybe decades, but I’ll get it. Thanks Matt for all the help!

For more useful stuff from Matt Schick check out these links:
mdadm Raid 1 migration
Raid ini Linux

iPods are hugely popular, Linux is also hugely popular. Thanks to the great folks at GTKpod and GNUpod we can now use them together.

GNUpod - Using iPods with Linux
GNUpod is a complete set of PERL scripts which allow you to use your iPod on Linux. It’s not user-friendly, but it’s a powerful library upon you (or more likely others) could write great programs for managing an iPod. As of the Feb 27, 2005 release, GNUpod works with the iPod shuffle.

GTKpod - Running iTunes on Linux
GTKpod is a complete iTunes replacement that runs on Linux. It even provides features that iTunes doesn’t, like exporting your songs to your computer. It may not seems big, but many iPod owners want to know how to get songs out of iTunes and export to their computer. Well, this is how to do it. GTKpod doesn’t currently (as of this article) support the iPod shuffle, but it promises to in its next release.

Matt Schick writes:

I’ve had a few different folks asking me about the various approaches for setting up software RAID arrays in Linux, so I figured it would be a good time to post the differing methods I’m familiar along with their pros and cons.

Matt’s got an excellent review of different applications to use RAID in Linux. The applications he discusses are:

• Enterprise Volume Management (EVMS)
• mdadm
• raidtools

See the whole review here

Thanks to Ted Guilds for his article on putting Debian Linux on a Dell Inspiron 600m. This is the machine that I use and it’s hard to find decent specs on it or good help with making Linux behave.

For all the owners of a Dell 600m it’s good to know that the wireless lan card can work but is not natively supported by the kernel yet. Check out the SourceForge project that is working to make this happen.

Yippee! We’ve got ourselves a real live report on a Linux installation. I love these because a person describing the installation process of a new distro of Linux helps everyone else in the world to prepare for when they take the leap.

Ubuntu is the subject of today’s installation, recorded at mrburnz.org. The author (Mr. Burnz I can only assume) reports:

I have to say I am impressed out how quick and painless it was–definitely the smoothest linux install I’ve done. The only device I will have to set up manually is my wireless card.

Five days later there is a post describing how even the wireless card was automatically prepared:

Turns out Ubuntu did detect my Atheros 802.11 a/b/g card during the install and set up the madwifi drivers. Wow. It is easily the best and simplest installer to date.

If anyone else has installed Ubuntu (or any other distro that was new to them), let me know about it. If you’d like to post the process as an article on Linux is Hard you’ll get full credit and linkbacks.

BSSteph at The Internet Hammer Enterprise has provided us with some beautiful screencaptures and video captures of the cutting edge of KDE 3.4. I’ve always been a little jealous of Apple computers with excellent graphic rendering and a very pretty GUI, but it looks like that’s all over now. Check out the KDE eye candy

In this round of eye candy, the active window (i.e., the one I’m working in) is drawn normally, but the other windows, which you can faintly see, are transparent. This is an experimental feature for an experimental feature, so it’s more than a bit buggy, but it’s fun to play with.

The video captures of the newest KDE (KDE 3.4) in use are also also available on The Internet Hammer Enterprise. There are versions with both Xvid and MPEG.

I can’t wait to use the next release of KDE.

I’m getting fed up with the way Suse 9.2 is running on my Dell 600m. Things are responding slowly, there’s hangups with the Intel ProWireless 2200 BG package (IPW2200) or its installation, and I’m starting to feel an itch for a new distro.

I’ve heard pretty good things about Gentoo lately, namely that their package installer, Portage, is excellent and unique in its field. Portage relies mostly on source code package for installations, rather than binary packages. Compiling a program from its source code is a little slower, a lot harder, but much more reliable because it creates a product that is honed to your specific system. Its because of this that I’m thinking Portage might be a much better choice for me. I wrote about Gentoo when I first heard about it, wondering if Gentoo could be better than others

If I do an install I’ll likely have another computer by my side so I can record all the stuff I encounter. If it turns out not to be worthwhile I don’t want all of the rest of us to have to go through the same muck.

If you’ve got a digital camera and you’re using Linux, you’ll eventually want to share your pictures. At least, you’d better - because people who take digital group pictures and don’t share them should be seriously penalized.

To do this you’ll need two things: the knowlege to use your usb camera on Linux and software to share your pictures with others

Using a Digital Camera on Linux:
This is by no means a detailed explanation of how to use a usb drive on Linux (for that check out NOVELL’s Cool Solutions page), but this should work in most cases.
First, plug the device into the computer via a usb cable.
Second, make sure the device is on.
Third, wait about twenty seconds.
If you’re running Gnome, you may see a new icon show up on your desktop at this point. To continue, you only need to open that icon and view/copy your pictures from there.
If you’re running KDE or another window manager or using this from a command prompt, the directions are slightly more difficult. First, check if you have a folder called /media by typing ls / at a command prompt. If you see “/media” as one of the results, you’re in luck. Enter that folder and view each of the devices - inside one of them should be your pictures.
If there’s no “/media” folder, then you’ll need to mount the device automatically. First, make a folder in the /mnt directory by typing (as root) mkdir /mnt/camera. Second, mount the camera by typing mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera.
Now you should browse to /mnt/camera and see if you can find your pictures.

For an additional guide to mounting a USB drive on Linux, check out dreamincode’s tutorial.

Sharing your digital pictures on Linux:
If you’ve got a website on a PHP/Apache server then I recommend you install CopperMine to take care of your photo sharing needs. However, if you don’t already know how to install CopperMine, then we’ll move on to JAlbum.

JAlbum is a piece of software that works on Windows, OS X, and Linux and is translated in 18 languages. It’s ideal for making a picture gallery in Linux. You can find JAlbum at it’s website. JAlbum will require a working installation of Java VM (also called Java runtime). The latest version of the Java VM.

After you download JAlbum install it by navigating to its folder and type chmod +x JAlbuminstall.bin. Then type ./JAlbuminstall.bin and follow the directions.

Once you install it and run it, you should be able to choose your desired HTML layout and have it automatically create a picture gallery for you.

If anyone uses this procedure please leave feedback so I can add other useful details.

One of the best things about running Microsoft Windows XP on a laptop is the excellent support for multiple batteries, hibernation, standby, etc. For those of us who use computers for many different tasks and like to keep applications open for days, hibernation is essential. Not having full-quality support for hibernation on my laptop was one of the first serious technology gaps I ran into between Windows and Linux. Also, the inability to hot-swap my dvd-burner and spare battery proved to be a real pain.

The development of ACPI on Linux is coming along but moving slowly. The ACPI packages that are coming out have partial support for hibernation (suspend to disk), standby (suspend to RAM), and another, even less complex form of standby. They aren’t on par with Microsoft’s technology yet, but they are coming along.

As a follow-up to the post about the current problems with Linux, it’d be negligent of me not to plug my very favorite Linux distribution. I hardly ever use it, but I have the greatest respect for it.
Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a complete version of Linux with many useful utilities that comes to a grand total of 50 Megabytes. It’s small enough to fit on a credit card-sized cd. As I type this there is a Damn Small Linux cd in my wallet. I can go to any computer anywhere, pull it out, restart the computer and have full control.

Damn Small Linux is a ‘live CD’ (see the Linux Live CDs post) which means that I don’t have to go through the installation process - it just runs. It’s not the full and weighty kind of Linux that I’m used to but it runs a window manager, networking stuff, a browser, an email client, various other utilities, and because each one is designed to take up only a little space they run very quickly.

Even if you have no use for it now, I highly recommend buying a copy for $5.50 (you could download it but you’d have to buy a special credit card-size blank cd) of Damn Small Linux and carrying it with you. The power to take over any computer you get near is good. The fact that you carry Linux in your wallet is great.

In Eric Clapsaddle’s Article A Linux Island in a C:\ of Windows, Part 1 | Linux Journal he discusses how to use Linux at work without buying any new hardware or trying to dual-boot anything. VMWare is a handy program that simulates a computer within your computer, so you can have a whole different PC running in a window on your desktop. The best part of this article is one of the comments: (by Paul Archer)

Repartition your drive and install Linux as if you were going to do a standard dual-boot setup. Then run VMWare under Windows and point it to the Linux partition. Now when you’re ready to switch to Linux as the primary OS, you can boot to Linux and setup VMWare on Linux to run Windows.
With this setup, you have the ability to access both OSes from either OS. And SuSE has a system profile switcher that would come in really handy for running Linux under VMWare and then switching to running natively.

The Linux Mafia has put out a report on running serial ATA (SATA) on Linux. If you’re running serial ata (SATA) on Linux or trying to run SATA on Linux, then you should check this page out.

Good excerpt from the page:

There is no such thing as a distribution or its installer (generically) “having SATA support” (or not). Please send anyone speaking in such terms to this page. (Some SATA chipsets have been supported since practically forever, as their programming interfaces are unchanged from PATA predecessors. Others are brand-new and require new drivers from scratch.)

Here’s a web page that is absolutely no help to me. Still, I recommend checking it out just to see how a detailed help page looks. This guy has what he calls the Linux Hardware Problem and Solution Page which does precisely one thing: It lists the voltage and some other setting requirements of a specific motherboard so you’ll know how to compile your linux kernel to work with that motherboard. This guy’s brilliant, but this page is useless to all but four people.

I give this example as a way to illustrate how difficult it is to collect really useful data into a Linux help page. You can either be too broad and help no one, or too specific and help just one or two people. I think this is why forums like the one at LinuxQuestions.org are important because it collects the sum of all the knowledge of it’s visitors, whether newbs or pros and selects just parts of that knowlege to answer specific questions. In my opinion this is a much better way to run a help site. Not to knock the guy at the first link - he wasn’t going for a comprehensive page.