Its been a while since I’ve written anything here. I’ve written plenty on various social media (G+, twitter, reddit mainly) but these places aren’t under my own control and eventually whatever I write there will likely be lost as these companies grow, change, acquire and get acquired and their priorities change. Usually the longer I take a break from writing here (in my own journal so to speak) the harder it gets to write here because I have to think of some singular topic that I can write about, but as there has been so much time between posts, I’ve done a hundred things and writing about just one of them seems to be giving that one topic too much gravitas. Instead, I end up summarizing a bunch of things I’ve worked on, then none of them seem very important and certainly aren’t described in the detail I’d like to provide.

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One thing I need in a vehicle is a working radio. It doesn’t have to be flashy, or even have bluetooth or a touch screen – I just need it to be able to tune in AM and FM radio and have a clock in it. The Van of Doom didn’t have a radio. It was supposed to have had a radio, but when I went to pick it up (at a used car lot that sells these kinds of used workhorse vans) the radio had gone missing. Probably it had found its way into another van on the guy’s lot for some reason and by the time I was there and wheeling and dealing I just couldn’t be bothered with that detail. I’d been looking for about 2 months and various vans had slipped through my fingers for one reason or another, and this one was just what I was looking for… minus the stereo. I had some funny idea that I would put one of those amazing new touchscreen models in there, maybe with a backup camera since the Van of Doom is very large and ponderous to back up. But when I finally made it to an audio shop to price it out it looked like I wasn’t getting anything installed for less than about $600 and $850 if I wanted that backup camera. Theres no way I was going to drop that kind of coin into this old hunk – its just for hauling stuff around! So I headed over to the local junkyard.
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Its been a while since I’ve posted anything here so just as an excercise for the fingers I thought I’d post an update about my current machine.

I’ve been running Arch on an old Thinkpad T410s for almost a year now ( journalctl says logs started on June 23, 2014). Its an Intel i5 M560 2.67 GHz from 2010 that was turned in by the sales department as its warranty ran out, physically broken (handrest cracked) with complaints about it being “too slow”. This was certainly true with Windows 7 on it. It hadn’t come with an nVidia card, so it just has the el crappo first gen Intel HD graphics. The screen is horrible – washed out, nowhere near as nice as some of the newer IPS screens, and not even as good as my old 2008 MacBook (though with a slightly larger screen res: 1440 x 900). I was able to buy a cheap handrest replacement off ebay for $15, and after finding that the reason it was so cheap was because they didn’t supply the electronics with it – forcing me to salvage that stuff off the cracked handrest – this second one has now cracked as well. The fan and heat pipe assembly needs to be taken out and cleaned but have been too lazy to get to it, the speakers are very quiet (compared to the MacBook at least), but everything works and its been a great learning experience for Arch.

I started using Arch on a USB drive in February of last year with a newer Dell laptop which I had to keep Windows installed on but quickly came to find that I’d rather have a permanent install to play with. This laptop quickly replaced my MacBook (which runs Ubuntu) as a daily driver mainly because its faster but while I like the keyboard more (I hate chicklet keyboards), its just nasty to state at for very long. While the USB install had i3 (a tiling windows manager) configured, I had decided to use KDE on the Thinkpad – and its been interesting getting to know KDE over the past year. At first I thought I was in love – I use Gnome 3 at work and on all my other machines, and KDE was responsive and looked good. It had all kinds of nifty graphical effects (most of which even worked on my slowgar graphics card too!) but little by little the love affair wore off. I just couldn’t find a way to use “activities” (KDE’s virtual desktops) without grumbling about it getting in my way, and the whole massive Akonadi experience with Kontact got frustrating after awhile. I liked kjots and kept a lot of notes in there (luckily, these can still be found in ~/.local/share/notes after kde is removed), but the font sizing for all the apps was always wrong and I couldn’t ever get it to be a comfortable size, and when kMail started having problems with certificates for accounts and the constant nagging error messages and notifications were the last nail. I ripped out KDE tonight and installed Gnome 3 and am busily moving in. I can see giving a die-hard Windows person KDE as their first Linux desktop because it would be very familiar to them, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to it.

Using a small laptop when you’re on the road is a great idea, they’re lightweight and easy to pack. You can quickly pull it out and work almost anywhere you can find a seat and get some work done with its integrated keyboard and touchpad but when you’re back in the office, using that same laptop feels confining and inadequate. Depending on what you need a computer to do, you might opt to have another more powerful machine set up on your office desk and just share files between them as needed but thats costly and a lot of folks don’t need the extra horsepower. When you have a full size desk to work at there’s really no excuse to cram all your program windows into a tiny laptop screen. You might even find yourself hunching over the desk uncomfortably because when the screen is placed at a comfortable distance (note: this distance tends to grow as you get older!), the keyboard (at least on most laptops) must remain physically attached to it and usually ends up at a sub-optimal length for comfortable typing. Setting up a monitor, secondary keyboard and mouse on your office desk that you can use with your laptop when you’re in the office makes your a laptop a lot more versatile.

This story is an elaboration of a discussion I have frequently with folks, so I thought I’d just jot it down so I can send a link to it next time someone asks.

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I’ve been using Arch more often than the Ubuntu machine lately and since I know that my Canon printer is not well supported under Linux I was putting off trying to get it going under Arch. In Ubuntu I was able to use some .deb packages that were hosted on a European Canon website to get the various Ubuntu boxes printing to it, but it wasn’t pretty and once they were set up, I’ve pretty well left them alone. These are my notes on what I did to get it working in Arch. Yet again the Arch Linux wiki made all the difference.

First I had to get cups installed which required a bunch of packages:
pacman -S libcups cups ghostscript gsfonts
Then I enabled and started the cups service which has a cryptic name:
systemctl enable org.cups.cupsd.service
systemctl start org.cups.cupsd.service (and restart will come in handy)
Then I needed the drivers for my Canon printer. The gutenprint driver package has them, although they are marked as Experimental which is better than nothing:
pacman -S gutenprint
I navigated to the CUPS admin page:
http://localhost:631
…and proceeded to futily try a million different connection settings starting with (ipp://, http://, socket://, etc.) pointing to the IP I knew was my printer with “Canon MX860 series – CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.10” selected as the driver, but nothing worked.

Finally I stumbled onto the cause of the trouble – my older Canon printer relies on a proprietary printing protocol called bjnp. Without this installed the printer will never respond. I’ve read that the newer Canons no longer use this protocol, but I’m not going to throw out a perfectly good printer! Unfortunately bjnp isn’t in the main repos, but it is in the AUR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cups-bjnp/
(this package has dependancy on cups and libcups)
after I unzipped and ran makepkg on that, I installed the resulting package:
pacman -U cups-bjnp-2.0-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
…then when I went into Cups administration to modify the printer settings I could see the Canon driver I had selected before now was available with a new connection type: bjnp (in my case it looked like bjnp://myCanonIP:8611)
I selected the radio button to choose that connection and was able to print over the wireless network to the Canon immediately.