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

Steam crashing in Openmandriva LX 3.0? Try this solution

I have been using Openmandriva LX 3.0 for some time now and I am very happy with it.  Since I installed it, this distro has fulfilled most of my requirements as a non-technical Linux user.

I did find a big problem, though.  The Steam client refused to work, complaining about Steam runtime not working and missing dependencies.  Even when I located the missing dependencies, nothing worked.

Yes, I know that some would call this a show-stopper.  However, I decided to go to the forums to ask for help.  The community is the power of Linux.

My cry for help was received promptly and courteously.  They suggested me to file a bug, and so I did.

Today, I got a response with the solution.  Now, Steam is working again!  This is how you do it (thanks to drosdeck for the help):

1. First, one has to make hidden files visible. Open Dolphin and go to the menu View.  Check the box "Hidden files".
2. Go to the hidden folder .local.  Once inside of it, move to "share" and "Steam".
3. Locate the file steam.sh and right click on it.  From the pop up menu, select Open with / Kwrite (root).
4. The system is going to ask you for your root password.  Type it and Kwrite will display the contents of the file.
5. Use the menu Edit and select Find from the drop down menu. In the search space, type tar -- 
6. You will be taken to a section that reads:

   >tar --blocking-factor=${BF} --checkpoint=1
   >--checkpoint-action='exec=echo $TAR_CHECKPOINT' -xf "$2" -C "$3" | zenity
   >--progress --auto-close --no-cancel --width 400 --text="$1"

7. Carefully delete the above section and paste this instead:

   >tar --blocking-factor=${BF}  -xf "$2" -C "$3" |
   >zenity --progress --auto-close --no-cancel --width 400 --text="$1"

8. Click on the icon Save and close the program.  That is all.  If the problem you had with Steam was like mine, the client should be working now. 

Big thanks to the guys at Openmandriva for taking the time to help me with this.  You all rock!

How a newbie fixed the display of a tablet

Last Christmas, I received from Megatotoro a great tablet as a present.  It was the ZaTab ZT2, a big Android tabled that my three-year old daughter loved... Yes, she practically would take it from my hands every time I took the device out. 

Well, like a week after I got the tablet,  I tried to charge it and the screen was black.  I thought that the battery was drained, but I knew something was wrong because I saw no indication of the tablet being plugged.

Sure enough, the tablet's display was not working.  My best guess is that my daughter dropped it and a connector was loose.

I did not want to go send it overseas to see if the warranty applied, so the tablet stayed there, with a pitch black display, for two weeks.

Today I decided to open it.  I had seen videos of how to do that before but, as my limited experience with computers includes only working with software (thanks to years of suffering with Windows and my successful migration to Linux in 2010), I was not confident that my attempt would be have a happy outcome.

However, if there's something I have learned as a Linux user, it is to look for help (tutorials, forums, etc) on the Web.   Thus, I found this Youtube tutorial by Tampatec explaining how to fix the display of an Asus Transformer.

It gave me the push I needed to try.

With the credit card trick I had no problem opening the tablet (well, after Megatotoro told me how to take out the four screws) and I looked for the loose connector... I took a short while because I am not used to working at that level (and much less with hardware!) but I found the culprit and pushed it in as instructed.

The tablet is now perfectly operational.  And, sure enough, my daughter is happy as a clam right now using it.

She is not the only happy one, though. I am proud of my accomplishment and my wife will get the new tablet I bought today, before I fixed the ZaTab ZT2.

One more thing...Thank you Tampatec, you are a genius!!!

How to wake up to music with Linux

I remember that, to finish my thesis, I had to get up at 3AM for over two weeks. I had to sleep in my office and I used my computer to set and fire several alarms: one to play a song at the desired time, another one to launch the browser, and a third one to open the thesis document. Back then, I thought Windows was a great OS because I was able to do all that. However, to be honest, it was not Windows that was doing the trick, but third-party software.

Now that I migrated to Linux, I realized that you can achieve exactly the same but directly from the OS, that is, without resorting to third-party software at all.

This is the way to do it:

1. Before the OS loads, press the key that the computer tells you to get into the BIOS. It can be DEL, ESC, or any other key that the system indicates. You have to press it quickly; you will be taken to a screen that looks like this:



2. Once in the BIOS, look for the Power Management page and follow the screen instructions to get "Resume by Alarm" or "Power On Alarm".
Set the desired time. Save (normally by pressing F-10), accept (yes) and then the computer reboots.


With this, the computer will turn on by itself at the desired time as long as it is plugged to a power outlet. That should be enough if you want the computer to wake you up. However, the idea is to make it play a song that you like and launch the programs that you need. To do that, you need to set some alarms in KOrganizer.




3. KOrganizer is hidden in Mandriva 2010 Spring. To find it, go to the bottom-right panel and click on the arrow to display it. KOrganizer, which is the program that will fire the alarms you set up, is a nice organizer that works pretty much like Outlook, only that KOrganizer is not so heavy on computer resources.







4. Once you find it, click to launch it and input the date and the time. You can just select the time periods as blocks on the schedule. Once you have set the time, you need to choose whether you wan to add an event or a "to-do" task. Actually, there is little difference for our purposes, but I normally go for "Add new event".







5. The following step is very easy: the alarms. There is a red icon that indicates the reminders.


You must click the box to be able to configure reminders. Once the box is checked, some options are enabled. Click on "advanced" to configure the time. Take into account that if the event is set at 8:30AM and you choose the reminder "5 minutes before the event starts", your alarm will go off at 8:26AM.

Now, if you want the computer to play a song for you, select "sound" and look for your song.
Obviously, you have to click OK to confirm and your sound alarm will be ready. If you want to launch your browser, select "application" instead of "sound" and specify the name of your browser. You can do the same for any other program.


I hope this tutorial saves Linux newbies like me some time when there is not any to lose ;-)