Saturday, September 27, 2008

Great file synchronization program and a gmail checker

I read about Dropbox, a (free!) file synchronization program which works in Windows, OSX (apple macs), and Linux. I installed in on my Ubuntu based laptop and it runs perfectly in Gnome. KDE4 seems to not run it automatically, though. But I haven't really tried to get it to work there yet. Unfortunately when I tried to install it on my wife's computer it only seemed to run for the Administrator, so under my login I couldn't access the files in it - not cool! But you can still access the synch files via the dropbox website, so that'll work until the Vista version gets all the bugs worked out. Overall, I like it a lot. The only negative, so far, is that it only has 2gb of online storage available.

And in other news I read in the latest edition (no. 17) of Full Circle about a email checking program for gnome, called checkgmail. You can grab it out of the repos with this command:

sudo apt-get install checkgmail

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Installing my new HP f4280 Deskjet printer in Ubuntu Gutsy

Okay, I've had a few problems getting my new fancy HP printer working. Basically the HPLIP program wasn't detecting the printer, and I think that was just a significant indicator of a bunch of underlying problems. Here's what I've been working through:

First, I hooked the printer up and turned it on after I was logged in on my computer. Kubuntu immediately detected the printer and installed the correct driver. But would not print!

Then I used the command 'sudo hp-setup' to try and set the printer up with HPLIP - it couldn't find the printer.

I found a thread here, and used the command 'hp-check -t' to try and figure out what was messed up. it gave me a list of dependencies that needed to be met. I went through and installed them. I on had one "already newest version". After doing all that, I ran the command again and still had errors.

In the end, I went to the HPLIP page, downloaded the latest version, followed the install instructions (hint - probably best to do custom install, it gives you more options). In the end the test page printed perfectly!!!

When I was finished I posted to the thread I had started on Ubuntu Forums as solved, then started another thread titled under my printer model so anyone else with problems could find it easy (yeah, I wanted to brag!), and then I found someone who needed help, so I got a second chance to share my good fortune (I guess it was the actually the fourth if you start counting with this blog post and include the original "problem" thread...).
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