The Blue Bird Effect: Scanning with an Epson XP 231 multifunction printer on Elive 3

Mamerto Menapace, an Argentinian monk, wrote a story entitled "El Pajaro Azul" ("The Blue Bird").  In this story, a prince gradually falls very sick and no doctor can determine the source of his disease. A hermit is brought from his mountain as the last hope, and this wise man tells everyone that the prince is dying of nostalgia.  To get cured, the prince must start a journey looking for a rare blue bird.

So, the sick prince travels all around the earth, in an futile attempt to find the blue bird and become well again.  However, no person has seen the bird and, defeated, he returns home as an old man only to discover that, among all the other birds that he had in his palace, there was a particularly blue one.     

Well, that same thing just happened to me with my Epson XP-231 multifunction printer and Elive 3.0, the new OS on my laptop.

Elive has been running magnificently; I could not be feeling happier.  Nevertheless, the real test of the OS is to get my printer/scanner to work.

The first part, printing, was not that difficult.  Even thought Elive comes with a convenient utility to add a new printer (the same one I have seen in Mageia 6) in Applications/preferences/print settings, the process of adding the printer gets stuck.  But this problem can be circumvented by opening the browser and typing http://localhost:631/ to go to CUPS.  From there, one can add the printer (once that the iscan bundle with the drivers is installed).

Scanning was, on the other hand, a nightmare.  I read lots of forums and tried many solutions to no avail.  Defeated, I ran another search and found a blog post with a procedure that looked promising.  I tried this last solution and, sure enough, it worked like a charm.

The great irony here was that it was Megatotoro, my own brother, who had posted here the procedure that I needed!  I looked all over the internet and the solution was closer than I had imagined, a complete blue bird effect.

In Elive, one has to basically use SciTE as root to open the files dll.conf (to add the line example-backend), epson.conf, and epson2.conf (to add the values that one gets with the comand sane-find-scanner in Terminology).  In my case, I had to uncomment, in both files, the line usb 0x01aa 0x0001 and modify it to read:

usb 0x04b8 0x1102

That was it.

Now I can both print and scan on Elive 3.0

One last job for my ZTE Open phone

My first cellphone was a ZTE Open that I bought on 2014.  It ran Firefox OS, which Mozilla discontinued in December 2015.  This meant that cetain apps ceased to work and the phone lost functionality.

I was happy with Firefox OS, but I had to replace it with an Android phone.  My ZTE Open became a museum piece that I turned on occassionally, mainly to play with my daughter some games that still work.

Last week, though, I took the 4-year old phone to an event to serve as an audio player.  I noticed then that the battery has started to swell.

Tomorrow, I will take it to class to play audio again.  I do not know how much time my ZTE Open has left, but it has been a champion.

Good things come to an end...

Elive 3.0 is out! And it is FREE!!

After a long period of development, Elive 3.0 has been finally released today.

Wow, I still remember the first day I saw Elive Topaz 2.0.  Never had I seen a distro most beautiful and efficient.  However, back then, the live CD asked for payment to download an installation module, which put me (and many other Linux users, I learned later) off.

Of course, those days, I was still discovering the world of Linux and Free/Open Source Software, so I had many inaccurate ideas about distros.  I did not know much about KDE or Gnome, let alone mention Enlightenment.  I struggled with GRUB.  I still did not understand the functionality of multiple work spaces and, obviously, I assumed that "free software" was meant to be free of cost.

Gradually, I became more supportive toward the idea of paying for Linux-related work that I loved and that, understandably, was something that I could not do myself due to my technical limitations.  I began paying for Mandriva Powerpacks, for example.  And I donated money, too.

I decided that I wanted to give Elive a chance.  "But I will support version 3," I said to myself.  That was 8 years ago.

Since then, the Linux landscape has changed a lot and those changes have also modified my perspective.  Mandriva, the distro that took me out of Windows, is gone.  Mageia came along, but seems to be stuck at release 6.  I started using PCLinuxOS and OpenMandriva.  I learned how to use GRUB2, made peace with KDE Plasma, and I installed unfinished versions to my main computer.  The unthinkable!

The latter is what happened to Elive.  I have been using beta versions... and I did not mind donating to the project.

Now, I am downloading the long-awaited release of this new version of Elive, which will replace my beta install, and my dream of having Elive 3.0 will become a reality.

  

Elive 3.0 to be released in a month

For those of us who have been following this stunningly beautiful distro, the 8-year waiting seems to be finally coming to an end.

The revamped site of Elive has a countdown indicating that version 3.0 will be released in 25 days.

I can barely wait...

The House of Elive Linux Revamped!

I visited the www.elivecd.org, the  page that houses Elive.  This is one Linux distro that caught my eye in 2009 and that I have been following ever since.

The site is being redecorated and renovated, which is a great change to reflect the polished nature of the distro that Thanatermesis (Samuel Flores Baggen) crafts there.

And it is no hyperbole.  Thanatermesis takes the polishing of Elive to a level of artistic detail.  Never in my live have I seen a Linux distro more elegant and resource-efficient than Elive.  No wonder release 2.0 was called Topaz. 

But version 3.0 is definitely going to be better in all senses.  I know because I am presently running a beta and it feels so much like a final release that I have no idea what the real Elive 3.0 will improve. My beta is 2.9.26... Not even 2.9.99, which is the last beta available.

Will Elive 3.0 become my birthday gift?  I hope so.  I am taking the revamping of the site as a signal.

Something Happened to My OpenMandriva Lx OS

Yesterday I booted my laptop with OpenMandriva Lx and went to look for a book.  When I returned to the machine, a kernel panic was waiting for me on the screen.

Apparently, something went very wrong with the updates that I performed last week, but I did not notice.

This has happened before, though.  As the laptop boots seven OSs (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Pisi, Elive, Fedora, and PicarOS), when I install a system that changes the OMV-controlled GRUB2, OpenMandriva gets a panic.

I do not have the expertise to rectify things other than by performing a re-install.  So, I reinstalled OpenMandriva, updated it (the process did not last more than an hour or so) and, sure enough, the OS was bootable again.

I added my favorite programs in a snap and checked that Steam was working. So was InSync.  Everything was OK.

Then, I remembered the all-in one Epson XP-231 printer.

I located the driver and installed it.  After that, as the printing functions are not normally the problem, but the scanner, I went to set up the latter.  As usual, it was not detected, so I added one from the list and that helped the OS find the scanner and configure it properly.  I tested it and it worked.

As I said before, getting the scanner to work has always been the headache, not printing.  However, this time, the printer would spit illegible code instead of the simple line I typed in LO Writer.

Nothing I tried worked.

Suddenly, I remembered how I managed to get the XP-231 to work in Fedora and Elive... The CUPS approach!

I opened CUPS and added the printer from there.  I chose the driver, checked the settings, and asked it to print a test page.

This time, I saw Tux come out from the printer, smiling on the page.

 ********************
If I had remembered before, I could have saved some time.  But, truly, since nothing had failed in so long, I have already started to forget what to do if one of my OSs misbehaves.

I am getting rusty.

Maybe it is time for me to start experimenting with BSD, Haiku, or something.

An Assistant on KDE Plasma?

Today, I learned that KDE and Mycroft collaborated to create a Mycroft AI assistant plasmoid.

Of course, this is not a final product yet and the easiest installation seems to be for Fedora.

Mozilla is also working on an assistant.  

I really like the fox concept.  It reminds me of old Scribble, from MS Office 97.

Unfortunately, both Mozilla's and Mycroft's seem to be for connected devices.

The Nostalgia of Old Games

I have never been much of a gamer.  However, I admit that, back as a Windows user, I got hooked on several titles, such as "Doom," "Heretic," and "Tomb Rider-- The Last Revelation".

My favorite games, though, were SNES ROMs that my brother, Megatotoro, taught me how to play with ZSNES.  Among them, I  recall "Super Puyo Puyo," "The Violinist of Hameln," "The 7th Saga," and "Bahamut Lagoon".

Today I found the old ROMs and, using WINE, I played them for a short while.

Wow, so many memories rushed to me!

The epic battles of Captain Kokoro (Byuu) and his faithful dragon Me (Salmando)!

A game that made me laugh and think a lot

This game had some of that sadness found in "This War of Mine"

I do not have the time to play them all again, but it was a nice visit to the past.

System Updates, Functionality and Popularity

As I have some free time, I decided to update all of the OSs on my laptop.

I started with PCLinuxOS.  The update was painless and everything is working perfectly.  Well, I noticed that my KDE History is never refreshed and that the Favorite tab displays nothing.  Aside from that, all is well.

Then I went for Fedora.  Nothing special to report there; all seems normal.

After that, I updated Mageia.  Again, no problem, either.

OpenMandriva was next.  This distro sometimes gives me problems if I try to update packages using Discover or the Control Center, so I ran urpmi --auto-update.  OpenMandriva did not show any weird behavior and the process completed flawlessly.

It was time to update Elive.  As this is a relatively old beta (Elive releases many betas), I was a bit worried.  The OS greeted me with an announcement that read something like this:  "There are new features available.  Do you want to install them?"  I agreed and then the OS played some music and performed an installation that, after a short while, was finished.  I noticed that, as the installer warned me, my wallpapers were gone, but there were applets for the clock and the wifi.  The OS looks as beautiful as ever.

Interestingly, and despite all the beauty and functionality that all of the distros I use provide, they are sliding down in popularity in Distrowatch.org:

Fedora is right now #8
PCLOS is # 21
Mageia went down to #35
OpenMandriva and Elive are not even included in the list of the 100 distros.

The list also shows that, apparently, Ubuntu never recovered its position as #1 after Mint took it.  However, Mint is now #2 and Manjaro has been #1 for some time now.  Oh, and MXLinux, the successor of the long-gone Mepis, is gaining traction: it has the 6th position.

Everything changes...

The 8th Anniversary

Today is this blog's 8th anniversary.
I still remember the first day I touched a Linux computer (my Asus Eee PC 900 with Xandros!) and, from that point, my journey of learning that was recorded in the entries of this blog.

The world has changed a lot since then:
Megatotoro and I are not the only Linux users in the university where we work any longer. 
LibreOffice is the official productivity software there. 
We have met other Linux users in public events. 
Android is a huge thing.  Windows phone is gone...
And there are many games to play on Linux!

My perception has changed, too.  I used to wait anxiously for each of the two Mandriva yearly releases because they would fix problems and, in so doing, my computer became more stable and reliable. Then I tested more distros, liked some, started waiting for Elive 3.0.   Mepis, Pardus, and even Mandriva disappeared from my HDs, replaced by Mageia, Openmandriva, PCLinuxOS, PicarOS, Elive (a beta!), Pisi, and Fedora.  The distros are so good that even betas outperform the final releases of the old times.

And the release cycles of the non-rolling distros have become more distant from each other.  Only Fedora keeps the pattern and I find that the new releases are coming too soon.  For example, Fedora 28 was just released today and I was not even ready!

Sometimes, I feel I do not have much to record here anymore. Oh, but I am still waiting for Elive 3.0!

I would like to express my appreciation to everyone who takes a moment from his or her busy life to read my entries.  Really, thank you very much!

Bendy and the Ink Machine, [Fixed] (Thanks to the Ninja Pizza Girl)

The game Bendy and the Ink Machine (BATIM) has been a headache for players who use Linux and Steam.

Following the release of chapter 3, an update broke the game.  However, there was a fix on the Steam forum.  One had to add this line to the properties of the game for it to run again:

-screen-fullscreen 0

But then, for Halloween 2017, the developers released a patch for a fun crossover with Hello Neighbor and, when they released the rollback to normal, the game was broken again and, this time, the trick to fix it was useless.

So, BATIM remained unplayable unless you installed the Windows Steam client and ran it with Wine.  Then, the game was playable, but the performance was not the same and there were some other problems, too.

I visited today the BATIM forum on Steam and discovered that the community is anxious because the release of chapter 4 was delayed to April 30.

Of course, I was not really excited, but I read a forum post with a new fix:  one has to copy four files from another game made with the Unity engine.

 libCSteamworks.so and "libsteam_api.so"--->/BATIM_Data/plugins/X86 and
libCSteamworks.so and "libsteam_api.so"--->/BATIM_Data/plugins/X86_64

I remembered that I had a game called Ninja Pizza Girl, so I looked for the files and copied them to the corresponding folders.  Sure enough, that fixed BATIM at last!

After playing for a while, I played the Ninja Pizza Girl... I didn't know that the game was about bullying among teenagers, inspired on the life of the daughter of the developers, who has Asperger's syndrome.  Wow!

In this game, Gemma, a 16 year old girl, must deliver pizza orders in a dystopian city.  As she jumps, climbs, runs, ducks, and slides to get to the client's house on time, she has to face the most nightmarish adversaries that a teenage girl can have: other teenagers!

I personally loved the fatherly advice given after each delivery.