I recently bought a HP Photosmart C4385 all-in-one printer/scanner. Nice thing about it is that printing/scanning can be done over wi-fi.

But to tell the truth I didn’t even hope that scanning would work over wi-fi with my Linux. And guess what? I was wrong! And not only did it work, it also took me just several minutes, probably even less then on windows (for which drivers where provided on a CD) to set it up.

Big thanks to HP for their support of Linux customers!

P.S.
Sorry I’m to lazy to write a howto, so just couple links:

• http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ - the drivers that do the magic, especialy nice ‘hp-toolbox’ tool
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HPLIP - Gentoo wiki page with lots of information

P.S.S.
Obviously printing worked just fine too :)

It is seems to be conference season in Silicon Valley now. The big JavaOne is almost here and to get everyone ready Sun set up the CommunityOne conference. This was mainly a one day event there was something yesterday (on Sunday) but very little.
The CommunityOne is free and is dedicated to open source. It left me no excuse for missing it. Well, I didn’t:

I should say it was more interesting than Web 2.0 Expo. Less buzz more technical stuff. Overall I’m very satisfied. Plus I’ve got a nice t-shirt with opensource mascot patterns:

Я тут недавно побывал на Web 2.0 Expo. И представьте мою радость, когда я невыспавшийся забежал в фуд-корт выпить чего-нить бодрящего и увидел вот это:

На прошлых выходных мы наконец-то сделали это. Хоть погода была не самая удачная, временами капал дождь, но мы взяли фотоаппарат сели в машину и поехали!

И вот что из этого вышло:

| View Show | Create Your Own

К сожалению, не удалось попасть в оффис mySql, а фоткаться у зданий AMD было малость стремно, т.к. это было похоже на маленький военный городок.

Еще мы побывали в “гостях” у Apple и IBM, но они были не очень фотогеничны…

Перед поездкой я думал, что самый классный офис будет у Google, но должен сказать стеклянные высотки цилиндрической формы компании Oracle, расположенные в живописном местечке в Redwood Shores, порвали Googleplex.

I was very lucky to get a one week vacation after working a little at my new job. So I decided to drive to Los Angeles for couple days. Since my car isn’t in the best condition I decided to rent something cheap but hopefully more reliable than my car for this adventure.

I was planning to move out on the morning of the 25th when everybody’s at home celebrating Christmas so the freeways would be truly free :)

But the downside was that no rental would work on the 25th so I woke up early on the 24th and drove to several rentals close to my home.

First I visited Hertz (probably because that’s the best known name), then Avis (I also had heard of it before), then United Alamo (never heard of it before, but it appeared to be located just in the middle of the first two) and finally Budget (which I noticed on my way home).

Most of them didn’t have any cars :(

So I guess it’s a good idea to make a reservation beforehand.

The prices where pretty much the same, just Budget was a little cheaper.

The bad news where that since I’m not 25 years old yet I would have to pay extra $25 for each day. But that still wasn’t too bad.

The worst part was that Budget was the only one that a had a car for decent money and they wouldn’t give a car to someone who is under 25 and doesn’t have a credit card. In the other places they would accept debit cards but as I said they didn’t have cars.

So I ended up saving some money and taking the risks. But hey my car took me to LA in just 6 hours and got me back home in a little more than that due to some traffic.

KDE has a very nice tool for configuring printers in ControlCenter.
Provided you have samba packages installed you can use it to add a printer shared on a windows xp computer. As designed it should work as a 5 click solution.
But for some weired reason (donna if it’s a windows or kde bug), SCAN function didn’t work well for me. It would display windows networks, it would even display computers in that networks, but when trying to look at available priters I would get:

Error returning browse list: NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED

Here is a solution I’ve found on Mepis forums:
- When you launch the Add printer wizard, choose SMB shared printer.
- In the next screen(user identification), choose Anonymous(no login/no password)
- Proceed to the next screen, and SCAN your network.(This is where you will get the NT_ACCESS_DENIED message if you try to access your Windows network)
- Now Don’t touch anything, and go BACK one step to the previous screen (User identification).
- In the user identification screen, choose guest(login = “guest”).
- Proceed to the next screen. DO NOT repeat a scan. Just try to access your Windows network in the displayed tree. You should magically see your Windows printer appear without any whining about access.

I use KDE.

I love:
Katapult
digiKam
K3b
Kopete
amaroK
yakuake

I like:
Ktorrent
Codeine

I hate:
konqueror (both as file manager and as browser)

I wish:
there was a way to completely replace konqueror with something simpler, like dolphin for example
firefox was ported to QT
eclipse was ported to QT
openoffice was better and ported to QT
Kget was better, had download speed throttling and schedule (like ktorrent)

Applications I use:
very often:
Katapult
firefox
Kopete
Eclipse
OO Writer
konqueror

often:
amaroK
kmail

from time to time:
digiKam
codeine
mplayer

rarely:
K3b

The “I wish” part upsets me, so here is my question:
How can I become happy?

Update: I’m happy now! 

Preface

It’s been only 2 weeks since I’d decided to stick with openSUSE but in a week or so I got tired of it. It feels bloated. It’s not as bad as Sabayon of course but still it didn’t make me happy.

While looking through different distros earlier this month I noticed one that I would like to try if I have a little more time.

The Arch

Emotions

And finally I did try, and I can tell you it’s fantastic!
Probably software development did make me a little pedantic but I really enjoy the KISS principle. And that’s what Arch Linux is about. Besides - it’s bleeding edge and I like that too.

It allows you to build your own unique system and that somewhat gives you the same feeling of creation as software development does.

Not That Much Emotions

It doesn’t have a gui installer. You just boot from a CD and then run different commands to install or configure different parts of your system. It actually appeared to be much simpler then I expected.

As you could have noticed I prefer KDE and fortunately Arch has great support of it.

Summary

Arch Linux is a great distro for someone willing to build his system almost from scratch. It’s not for average user but I think many computer enthusiast, programmers, geeks and nerds should love it :)

P.S. my arch boots to login in 32 seconds and then kde starts in another 8

It has been quite some time since I’ve returned from Netherlands but I never managed to put some photos here. So I’ll try to make up for that with the following series of funny photos (feel free to click on them):

This is a nice cafe in Antwerpen:

Note: Panos in Russian means “diarrhea”

Dangerous hatch cover:

Please zoom in

Gentleman in Amsterdam (Red Lights District):

And you can see some more here

Preface

As I wrote before, I’ve been using Kubuntu Edgy 64bit and I was pretty much satisfied with it.
The only problem I had was with my laptops built-in web camera. There are no drivers for Linux and it doesn’t seem there will be anything in the near future.

(Note: there are some people out there struggling to create those drivers but I don’t think they will have any good results till end of this year)

And when my parents asked to set up skype video conference with their friends I had no other choice then installing windows.

And as I’ve been using the Kubuntu for 4 month I decided to reformat my entire system and do a clean setup of Windows and Linux.

The Main Story

Since it has been a while (haha - 4 month) since I’ve looked at different Linux distributions I decided to try something new :)

Sabayon 3.26 64bit

This is a quite impressive distro built on top of Gentoo and proposed to be 100% Gentoo compatible.

Installing

It was pretty easy but took a lot of time (as I found out later because it installed all the packages that were on its dvd)

Using

This is the only distro (among all that I’ve tried) that got correct resolution for my laptop monitor and wifi with WPA working right out of the box.

It has all the multimedia codecs installed so it is ready to rock.

Plus it has a nice default KDE theme, but not very good integration with Gtk so Firefox and Eclipse look a little inconsistent.

It really seems to be Gentoo compatible since it uses Gentoo’s online repositories (correct me if I’m wrong).

It is horribly slow. It starts up and shuts down on my dual core laptop longer than Windows XP on my old AMD Duron box.

Searching for the programs you need takes a while because it has installed so many packages that the you can get lost.

Result

I decided to find something else because it was just too slow.

MEPIS 6.5 beta 7 64bit

I decided to try it since I’ve read so much how good it is at auto configuring the system and because it is Ubuntu based (Yes I do like Ubuntu :))

Installing

Fast and simple!

Using

Didn’t use it for too long cause the damn thing didn’t auto configure my wifi and after googling a little I had an impression that there is some problem in MEPIS with madwifi drivers (thats what my wifi card uses). But still don’t want to say anything bad about MEPIS since I used a beta version.

Result

Moving on :)

openSUSE 10.2

Well it’s SUSE :)
It gotta be good.
There are some not nice things regarding Novell and Microsoft. But it doesn’t bother me that much yet.

Installing

Easy + configurable. Not fast and not slow.

Using

I got my monitor conifgured during installation. But wifi drivers didn’t install automatically. The good thing is I just needed 5 minutes of googling and then another 5 minutes to install the drivers manually.

Result

I’m sticking with openSUSE for now, at least until Feisty Fawn is out.

Note
I think I’ve also tried Mandriva 2007 Powerpack between Sabayon and MEPIS but can’t realy remember why I dumped it :(