sit back and relax as Moonlight is installed.

It took half the night to install what appears to have been a couple of gig of diskspace.
Now I want to get rid of it.

Out, damned spot!

But I can’t.

All suggestions welcome.

For the record, the video was Muhammed Yunus speaking at the Microsoft Partners Conference and it was well worth the trouble. However, for those of you without Silverlight/Moonlight, check out this great Nobel Prize-winner here. There are several videos of him at this site but I recommend his talk on Social Business to the Commonwealth Club San Francisco, CA.

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Upgrade to the Latest Compiz: Tombuntu

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These seem to have given me, via System/Prefernces/Control Center/Advanced Desktop Effects - certain effects, like transparent windows, Wobbly Windows, and the Windows open and close in a peculiar fashion, whatever that’s called!! I think it may be Fading Windows.

But I can’t seem to get the Cube, or perhaps even more useful,

I downloaded Compiz Check from Furlong’s Blog and got this information.

Gathering information about your system…

Distribution: Ubuntu 8.04
Desktop environment: GNOME
Graphics chip: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
Driver in use: intel
Rendering method: AIGLX

Checking if it’s possible to run Compiz on your system…

Checking for texture_from_pixmap… [ OK ]
Checking for non power of two support… [ OK ]
Checking for composite extension… [ OK ]
Checking for FBConfig… [ OK ]
Checking for hardware/setup problems… [ OK ]

That’s all I’ve time for now, but I’ll return to this. I’ll be amazed if I get it going.

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Anyway, today, I installed wireless, having done without it for a few weeks, again without problems, and decided it was time to install the printer, and with a bit of luck, the scanner. To recap, I have a Samsung Laser Multifunction SCX-4200, which seems to have caused untold grief on Ubuntu, and not just for me.

I followed the HOWTO Install Samsung Unified Printer Driver instructions at Ubuntu Forums, but while that installed the printer, the scanner was nowhere to be seen.

It really doesn’t have to be this hard, does it?

Which is not a dig at tweedledee, who so generously got so many Samsung printers running, including mine, but I think his tutorial is now outdated with the new Samsung driver - unless of course, the Samsung instructions are a security risk.

Are they?

UPDATE: I forgot I also followed the instructions here, which may have been crucial. Thanks tayroni.

Anyway, I thought I’d uninstall and try again, this time with the instructions from the Samsung site, but having followed the initial tweedledee instructions - sudo chown -R root:root * - all permissions were locked up in root, so I couldn’t uninstall.

I’m not too good at the remembering codes but after much searching I found the code: chmod -R 777 (thanks Nihilocrat at Ubuntu Forums), which get ALL the existing files and subdirectories to 777, that is, back to where you are the owner, not root.

So, if my memory serves, in the Terminal, cd ~/cdroot
yourusername:~$ ~/cdroot$
yourusername:~$ ~/cdroot$ chmod -R 777 Linux

That allowed me to uninstall.

So, back to the Samsung site instructions. (remember, cdroot is the folder the driver extracts to)

[Ubuntu OS Installation]
1. Download and extract the driver
2. Open ”Root Terminal”
3. Execute installation program.
$ sudo cdroot/autorun
4. After intall, PPD path is set again.
$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/cups/model/samsung /usr/share/ppd/custom/samsung
5. Execute Configurator, and Add your printer model name by Add Printer

It was so simple I couldn’t believe it.
Done.

Just go to Applications/Samsung Unified Driver/Samsung Unified Driver Configurator. Click on the Scanner symbol. The SCX-4200 Series on USB 0 icon will appear. Highlight it, then click on Properties, and then you can scan to your heart’s content.

The software isn’t as fancy as in Windows, but it works perfectly, and you can resize the image too.

I really hope there are no security issues in this. Do check the forum on this before risking your setup.

Now for OCR.

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Anyway, the solution is to go to System->Help and Support, then Music, Videos and Photos, then Playing DVDs.

Great film, by the way, if you like films about real people.

Update: I completely forgot that Ubuntu Tutorials had blogged about this just the other night. It might be simpler to go there first.

Enable Commercial DVD Playback on Ubuntu 8.04

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[update: in case you haven't done this before and are wondering where is cdroot - when
you extract the .tar.gz it extracts to a folder called cdroot.]

[Ubuntu OS Installation]
1. Download and extract the driver
2. Open ”Root Terminal”
3. Execute installation program.
$ sudo cdroot/autorun
4. After intall, PPD path is set again.
$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/cups/model/samsung /usr/share/ppd/custom/samsung
5. Execute Configurator, and Add your printer model name by Add Printer

I’m not sure I know what all of that means, but see also HOWTO Install Samsung Unified Printer Driver (Mini-guide to installing Samsung printers & Unified Driver:Updated 28 April 2008 )

SCX-4200 Unified Linux Driver

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Fixes

# Modifies the thermal policy to lower the local alert temperature.
# Fixes an intermittent issue where the notebook does not detect the hard drive when booting.

An intermittent issue where the notebook does not detect the hard drive when booting sounds suspiciously like what’s been happening. It’s really extraordinary that a company of HP’s reputation would release a computer with this fault.

Anyway, the procedure went well - done in Vista of course. I’m not sure that I’ve noticed any difference, but hopefully the freezing will now stop.

I’ve been reading very mixed reviews about Ubuntu 8.04 but I’ll give it a go shortly.

If you have an HP Pavillion 6558ea, this is the page for the Winflash bios upgrade (Release Date: 2008-04-25, Version: F.53)

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Ubuntu has a dropdown menu at the top of the screen to launch applications, which is very similar to the way Windows has the start menu at the bottom of the screen. If you are a windows user new to Ubuntu, you may prefer to have the windows key launch the applications menu. Thankfully this is an easy thing to do in Ubuntu.

Go to the details at How-To-Geek here

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That’s step one. The extra code that should go into the .htaccess files is at B Space.

And finally, there is a curious and annoying quirk that distorts thumbnail images.

If you don’t want your thumbnails to get distorted, you need to change WordPress 2.5’s default setting before you upload your photos into the media manager. Go to Settings > Miscellaneous and UNcheck the “Crop thumbnail to exact dimensions (normally thumbnails are proportional)” box.

Thanks to Sillybean.net for that one.

Yes, I’ll upgrade my own Wordpress sites asap, as while every radical new design entails a learning curve, this one will be worth it, I think. But do see to the above caveats first.

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IrishTeam/HardyReleaseParty (see ILUG post about PoTD)
The Long Stone Pub

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