HP LaserJet P1005 on Fedora 17

A year ago I got myself a cheapo HP LaserJet P1005 printer. The price was right and it worked well with my openSUSE 11.4 (after some titanic struggles) desktop and Ubuntu 10x notebook then. Fast forward to the end of 2012, post apocalypse; and the printer was starting to gather dust at home and not wanting it to be the nesting grounds for ants, roaches and other nasties, I decided to bring it to work - as a temp printer (the office's primary printer has lapsed into deep coma) for the tech department.

My work desktop (also from home) is running Stella Linux, a respin of the venerable CentOS with all the nice multimedia bits with my primary lappy and on Fedora 17, as with the rest of the techies.

I was ready for some titanic struggles as I did with my desktop's previous openSUSE host; so with sleeves folded up and skipping lunch - me ready. Alas, after 5 minutes of Googling I found this page which directed me to the HP Linux Printing and Imaging page my anticipated struggle was resolved within 10 minutes.

Got my desktop's CUPS setup and firewalls opened for 631 TCP/UDP, enabled remote access to my CUPS server and shared printer.

All is working now.

Let the tree killing begin!!!


 

Roboto Fonts

The Roboto set of fonts used in the Android Ice Cream Sandwich platform can now be downloaded from http://developer.android.com/design/style/typography.html

For GNU/Linux, just download the file, unzip it, create a dir in /usr/share/fonts/, copy *.ttf to that dir and then just run fc-cache and you are good to go.

Enjoy.

New Font Repo for openSUSE

Adding fonts is pretty easy in openSUSE (and in GNU/Linux) generally - create a dir in /usr/share/fonts dump your ttfs in it run fc-cache or SuSEconfig (under openSUSE or SLE)and you are done.

However having a repo of about a hundred fonts that can be added from Yast is just heaven sent. Add the repo and refresh it:

zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/M17N/openSUSE_12.1/ Fonts

zypper ref Fonts

And you are good to go.

It also has support for openSUSE 11.4, Tumbleweed, SLE 11 and Factory. 

Installing LibreOffice.org on openSUSE 12.1 LXDE

openSUSE 12.1 comes with LibreOffice. 3.3 by default. To enable LibreOffice 3.5 on openSUSE 12.1 you can either download the RPMs from the LibreOffice site and manually install or add the LibreOffice Unstable Repo

zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Unstable/openSUSE_12.1/ LO

Refresh the repo

zypper ref LO

You can then install LibreOffice from Yast. Remember to add the libreoffice-gnome package or the LibreOffice will look butt ugly.

If you are using the LXDE flavour of Ubuntu, Lubuntu, remember to add libreoffice-gtk for the same reason.

Enjoy!

LXDE and Compiz - urggh

I enable Compiz and Emerald on my Centos 6.2 desktop at work. Didn't know what got into me but I then decided that Compiz would be awesome on my openSUSE 12.1 LXDE. After installing the necessary packages and changed the Windows Manager to Compiz from lxsessions-edit (Desktop Sessions Settings in GUI speak) I rebooted.

Logged in OK but quickly discovered that Windows' top panels were missing and no matter what I did, I could not type anything.

Argghhh....

Well edited ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf  file and changed the window_manager = line back to openbox-lxde , logged out and in and all is well now...CLI roxx!

openSUSE 12.1 - Choppy Fullscreen Flash Playback

Been a fan of openSUSE on thing that always got on my nerves was the choppy full screen Flash playback on browsers. Fedora worked fine and so does Ubuntu - I mean openSUSE is awesome all round but WTF is wrong with it?

Well to reduce its choppiness - edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and on the kernel line remove quiet and vga=0x317.

The bootspalsh will be lost but the choppiness is gone. This has only been tested in Intel 915 chipsets. Can't guarantee that it'll work on others. but it is worth a shot.

Installing LibreOffice 3.5 on openSUSE 12.1

openSUSE 12.1 does not have LibreOffice 3.5 in any compatible repos. Being a PM LibreOffice is an indispensable tool to me and this being a still MS Office dominated world, I find that LibreOffice 3.5 has a slightly better compatibility with MSO than 3.4x.

The long and short of it , if you want LibreOffice 3.5 you gotta download from http://libreoffice.org extract the tarballs and install the RPMs. It installed fine and should work but then I encountered:


error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I had another WTF moment until after sometime I found out from an unrelated topic that you need to do a

zypper in libpng12-0 libpng14-14

And all was fine.

Installing Skype on Fedora 16 64-bit

Skype has no 64-bit version for Linux. And since it is now a Microsoft company I am unsure whether there will be any newer version beyond the current 2.20 Beta.

To get it installed on my Fedora 16 64-bit proved to be quite a trying task. After downloading the Fedora RPM, one would think that a simple

yum install skype-2.2.0.35-fedora.i586.rpm

Could have done the trick. Instead I got a

[ericyeoh@harkonen ~]$ skype
skype: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

After trawling through some websites I finally found out that there are some dependencies required. This site provided the answer.

In short you need to:

yum install glibc.i686 qt.i686 qt-x11.i686 libXv.i686 alsa-lib.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686

And I got Skype running. And now I await the next instructions from my overlords via Skype...

When LibreOffice decides to not work

I did a distro upgrade of my openSUSE 12.1 (zypper dup) and ran into a fatal error when tryong to launch any LibreOffice app,

The application cannot be started.
[context="shared"] caught unexpected exception!

I had one of those WTF moments until I Googled and found out that you only need to delete the .libreoffice/ hidden directory in your $HOME to resolve it. Now I can get back being a happy typist!