Having a new addition to the family (our new month old daughter, Allison) my wife was itching to begin printing some photos to get started on a “Baby’s first year” type of scrapbook. Unfortunately our HP Officejet printer decided that it was above the task of putting ink on paper some time ago. No amount of pleading with this lousy HP printer would convince it otherwise. Given the circumstances, after some discussion, Jessie and I decided that we had little choice but to fire the Officejet and seek a replacement.

A quick Google search for the MFC-495cw prior to running out to Best Buy confirmed that people appeared to be having success with this printer under Ubuntu. Given that, the decent feature set and the low price of $99 we decided to give this printer try.

Given that the HP printer was just over two years old, we decided against another HP this time around. Although unhappy with the longevity of our existing printer, I was always quite pleased with the cross platform driver support with HP printers. I’ve had this Officejet working with OS X, Windows, Linux and even FreeBSD with minimal fuss.

Unfortunately, much to my disappointment, Karmic 64-bit was unable to support this printer out of the box. A quick browse around the web uncovered a page on Brother’s site that did have Linux drivers but attempting to install them yielded only the following:

dpkg: error processing mfc495cwcupswrapper-1.1.2-2.i386.deb (--install):
 package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)

Apparently 64-bit support is not something that Brother has tackled yet. In addition their instructions and workarounds for getting up and running are pretty scattered.

Essentially, grabbing the appropriate files (you need both the lpr and cupswrapper packages) and running the following commands seems to get everything up and running:

1. aa-complain cupsd
2. mkdir /usr/share/cups/model
3. apt-get install ia32-libs
4. dpkg –force-architecture -i mfc495cwlpr-1.1.2-1.i386.deb
5. dpkg –force-architecture -i mfc495cwcupswrapper-1.1.2-2.i386.deb

About a month ago, I reached the breaking point of my own curiosity and decided to wipe out my Ubuntu installation in favor of the latest Fedora release. The VAIO notebook I loaded it on has typically served as my ‘plaything’ machine, as opposed to being my primary workhorse computer.

Due to this choice of purpose it changes Linux distributions or even operating systems on a pretty regular basis. More recently I was even perverted enough to allow it to dual boot with Windows 7 Home Premium, but that’s a filthy confession for another day.

I’ve always wanted to like Redhat and by extension the Fedora project. If I recall correctly, Redhat was the first Linux distro I used around the 5.0 release. Though it wasn’t long before I grew annoyed by the RPM dependency hell that was common in that era. My solution at the time was to nearly abandon package management altogether and seek refuge in Slackware. Over the decade to follow I’ve probably experimented with more Linux distributions than I can practically recall, assigning several as personal favorites for specific roles.

The last time I used Fedora for something serious was around Fedora Core 2. Looks like I’ve missed the last 10 releases are so. Things have certainly improved. Though yum doesn’t seem quite as intelligent as apt, it does seem perfectly suited for the task at hand. In my (give or take) month I’ve been playing with Fedora so far, everything I’m accustomed to using appears to be in the standard repositories and nothing has given me any grief in terms of satisfying dependencies on installation. Probably the biggest thing I miss is the whole ‘apt-get autoremove’ command for cleaning out dependencies that were pulled in for packages that I’ve since removed. The closest equivalent I’ve been able to find is ‘package-cleanup –leaves’ which only lists packages without dependencies. Not as intelligent or automated, but it still accomplishes the goal of removing cruft I’ve built up.

As far as package management goes, I’m holding out for the real test. Ubuntu has handled major version distribution upgrades with more grace and polish than I’ve seen relative to any other distro. I’ll certainly hold on to Fedora for long enough to see how well it fares in this regard.

That last point aside, the differences between apt/yum and Debian/Redhat distributions are approaching the point where everything can be boiled down to personal preferences and aesthetics. I am enjoying the default Fedora artwork over the gloomy orange/brown Ubuntu defaults. My preference is not to spend too long tweaking my themes before my eyes stop bleeding.

The Fedora repos also appear to be far less conservative in terms of packaging the latest releases of major applications. Ubuntu tends to lag behind on Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice packages.

Overall, it’s been a pleasant experience thus far. Maybe I’ll keep it for a little while?

Did this post have a point?

Yes!

1. I needed to post something, it’s been too long. You don’t want people to worry, do you?
2. If you haven’t tried Fedora in a while (or at all), give it a spin. You may just like it.

Alright… So not really.

It all started yesterday during my regular routine of discarding my wife, Jessie’s, newly delivered fliers into the recycling bin below my mailbox. This time, I happened to open up the bundle of fliers and caught a glimpse of a Sony Vaio NR280E/S notebook going for only $699. I’ve always thought the Sony line of notebooks were quite aesthetically pleasing, though rather pricey. At this price point however it seemed like an attractive proposition.

I rolled up the fliers and placed them back in the mailbox to figure out later. The following morning when Jessie fetched her fliers (probably somewhat surprised that she actually had some for once) I mentioned the attractive looking Vaio in the Best Buy flier. After brief discussion, I pulled up further specifications on the machine, thus revealing that all the key components (wireless, video, etc) were Intel based. In addition, the price on the web site was actually only $599! Given Intel’s above average openness in specifications and open source code contributions, these components just made the machine even more attractive.

After further discussion, she told me to go and buy it if I wanted it. What kind of a poor husband would I be if I argued with my wife? It was now my duty to acquire this machine. Gleefully, I took the machine home, plugged it in and began to correct its one major flaw… The hard drive appeared to have some strange data embedded in it causing severe performance issues and limiting the machines usefulness. After some research on-line I determined this mysterious data was actually intended to be a commercial product. Apparently its developed by a shoddy corporation operating out of Redmond and was known as Microsoft Windows Vista.

I was surprise that a machine would leave a reputable organization like Sony’s manufacturing facilities in such condition, but remaining calm I figured there would have to be a recovery disc to restore the machine into a usable state. Much to my surprise, no such disc was in the package! Fortunately a company called Canonical had a freely available recovery CD called Ubuntu Hardy Heron Beta 1. Internet folk-lore has it said discs have been used to recovery many recent computers purchased in a similar state.

It worked! This machine is now running great! I’m sure it will serve me well for many years to come as my new Ubuntu machine! Woohoo!

Given my excitement of today’s acquisition, I felt compelled to contact one of very few friends geeky enough to appreciate my successful operation. Lo and behold, apon hearing of my tales of operation system purgatory, Josh decided this endeavor would be an excellent way for him to dispose of $599 as well.

Not being a man of patience, I figured with the final release of Gnome 2.22 included in the latest Hardy Beta, now would be a good time to jump on the Hardy band-wagon.

Everything seems to be working solid. They’ve even included the previously missing Keyspan module. Woo hoo!

Unfortunately I did run into one major issue, Compiz completely stopped working after the upgrade.

Doing some Googling revealed the following Bug no. 201330: Need to whitelist multiple ATI cards, or remove blacklisting.

Apparently an overly broad blacklist has been placed on all Radeon graphics existing in laptops. Good to know a bug has already been opened on the issue. I imagine this will be resolved before Hardy’s release.

In the mean time, those running Hardy Beta on hardware they know works with compiz can comment out the line 270 to 278 in
/usr/bin/compiz:

#don't run on laptops using ati driver
if laptop-detect; then
        for DRV in ati radeon; do
                 if egrep -q "Loading ${XORG_DRIVER_PATH}${DRV}_drv\.so" $LOG &&
                   ! egrep -q "Unloading ${XORG_DRIVER_PATH}${DRV}_drv\.so" $LOG;
                 then
                        verbose "Found laptop using ${DRV} driver. \n"
                        return 1
                fi
        done
fi

After making the above change, Compiz will work every bit as well as it has in previous releases.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was released yesterday. Overall the improvements are huge. Amongst other things driver support for my aging four year old laptop is nearing perfection.

The only thing that did not work out of the box is my trusty Keyspan USA-19HS USB to DB9 serial adapter. Primarily my laptop is used as a portable tool for on-site network administration. This work often involves configuring various enterprise grade hardware via a serial console. Needless to say, this is functionality I depend on.

A quick visit to Keyspan’s web site provided some initial clarification regarding this issue:

However, certain Linux distros (primarily Ubuntu and Debian) choose to not include a complete install of our drivers and firmware due to philosophical issues with our license text. Although the majority of the Linux community is fine with our license, Ubuntu and Debian require you to install the Keyspan drivers manually.

I’m not sure what it is about the license for the Keyspan USB drivers that is out of line with Debian or Ubuntu’s philosophy. The driver does require closed firmware to be loaded, but the same can be said for the Intel WiFi drivers which are included by default in the base system.

Either way, building the missing kernel model from source is a rather daunting exercise for Linux beginners. For that reason, I decided to build a Debian package of the missing driver.

Once the package is downloaded it can be installed via:

dpkg -i keyspan-ubuntu-2.6.22.deb

After the package is installed the Keyspan should be accessible via /dev/ttyUSB0.

All that being said, this packages comes with a few caveats:

• This is my first attempt at a Debian package, I’m sure it’s far from perfect.
• The driver can be built with different firmware for different Keyspan devices, this one is only built with the USA-19 firmware.
• This package is probably married to the kernel version it was built for and will not likely work next time the Ubuntu kernel image package is updated.

Hopefully whomever with Ubuntu responsible for packaging the kernel and modules either includes this driver in the future or at least makes it into an optional package in the restricted repository. Failing that, if there is enough interest I may continue to maintain and improve this package to ease the installation for other Ubuntu users.