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Showing posts with label canon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label canon. Show all posts

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Ubuntu and Canon

I know that Murphy's Law covers a great many things. I haven't had time to sit down and read them all, so if there isn't one that matches it, or if there is one I want to rename it, that states "If something can go easy or it can go difficult and it always goes difficult" that's Mandi's Law.

So in a previous post, I talked about how I installed Ubuntu on my external hard drive. Well, of course my Canon Pixma ip4200, and all Canon's for that matter, aren't very compatible. Why did I have to have a printer out of thousands that wasn't compatible? That's right, Mandi's Law! So after many frustrating hours of trying to get it right with the driver that's supposed to be for that printer, I may have found a solution using a Canon bjc-8200 model with the recommended driver. It printed the test page and a spreadsheet successfully. I haven't tried a picture, but I'm going to end the night on a successful note and not try it until later.

I still haven't gotten MLB tv/audio to work in Firefox on Ubuntu, but I do think I'm getting closer. I gotta get it working before April 1st for sure. ;)

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Lambs and Ubuntu

This weekend has been productive. We've had four lambs yesterday and one this morning. The totals are twelve live lambs (eight females and four males), and we've lost five. There are eleven ewes left to have lambs. We don't have as many as we did last year at this time, but the ones we have sure look good.

Also this weekend, I successfully installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) onto my usb external hard drive. I thought that installing and using Linux would be fun and I might learn something in the process. I was right. Using this guide and steps 1-3 of this guide and a little googling, I was able to get it going. From this, I learned that my SATA controller shows up as /dev/sda vs. /dev/hda that the guides have, and so my external hard drive shows up as /dev/sdb. I point this out in the hopes that it might help someone else that is as newbie-ish as I am. Also in the BIOS (which you want to be careful messing around in), on my Dell Dimension 8300, to set the boot order I had to go to the boot sequence menu, put CD-ROM first and Hard Drive second. Then go into Hard Drive boot sequence (can't remember right now exactly what it was called) and move USB up to the top. Also, the default setting in the GRUB bootloader menu file has to be changed. To do this, use Step 11 in this guide. If you reboot before editing this file, you might get an error and it asks you if you want to edit the file (or something like that). Choose to edit the file and find the place that says "(hd0,x)" where x equals anything other than 0. Change the x to 0 and hit enter. I believe it tries to start up again and it should go into the login process. Then after you're logged in, you can change the menu file.

I was able to change my monitor settings, but I haven't figured out how to get my Canon Pixma ip4200 to work. It'll work using Turboprint, but the free version puts the logo on it and I don't think I want to pay for it, so I'd like to get the driver working. I got tired of messing with it and decided to play with other stuff and come back to it.

So now I have the best of both worlds. If I want to boot up in Windows, I just turn off my external hard drive, otherwise I leave it on and I'm in Ubuntu.

I also got to see my family this weekend. My nieces' birthday party was yesterday. I think everyone had a good time. Levi and I played basketball for an hour and I'm feeling it today. Then they came down to Dad's today and had lunch. That Colin Dade is such a cutie!

It was just a pretty darn good weekend.