Another Printer Answer and Mint 3.0 Beta 012

More Unsupported Printers w/ Linux Help

The OZ LUG that Richard queried for a solution to the non-supported Linux printer question noted in my last post has come up with another approach:

There's a small windows program called printfile, which can print several
types of files... If you set up a virtual printer to save files to a
predefined spool directory, it can pick up that file automatically and
print it on a predefined printer...

<http://www.lerup.com/printfile/>

No support for advanced stuff like tray selection, etc. though!

--
Francesco Peeters

I love the Linux community....

Mint 3.0 Beta 1

I like Ubuntu. A lot. This was not always the case. I like Mint even better. It fixes many of the things I do not like about Ubuntu, such as the color/sound schemes, and adds good stuff like MintWifi.

One of the points of the various Monster mashes I did was to get to the feisty goodness of Ubuntu 7.04, while maintaining the basic niftiness of Mint. I mentioned three mashes I did here. [1] [2] [3]. I did another when I returned from Linuxworld. I decided not to bore anyone with it here.... it worked more or less as the others did.

The Fourth Mash

The IBM T41 was running Fedora Core 6 for the purposes of the Linuxworld lab. After I was back, caught up on sleep, and had time at night to experiment, I laid down Mint 2.2, then took the Ubuntu 7.04 upgrade. This requires booting into single user mode, cd'ing to "/home", and running the command "chmod -R steve:steve steve" to get the Fedora created 'steve' home directory moved to the UID the Ubuntu created for that user name. Really: why can't "install" figure that out?

I'll put back up and OpenSUSE 10.3 and Fedora 7 system soon enough, on some test machine some place. For now, I am experimenting in Ubuntu-space. I am partly setting my self up to play with Linspires Ubuntu port of "Click and Run", whenever that comes out. but that is all later. I digress.

The point of the Mint / Ubuntu mash on the formerly FC6 T41 was that I am interested in a few things about Evolution and the way that it upgrades between versions (in this case, 2.8 to 2.10, and between totally different distros). When that experiment was done (and some things about Evolution I have recently learned will be in a different post soon) The release of the first Beta of Mint 3.0 was conveniently out.

UnMash and Clean install

I put Mint 3.0 down over the top of the Mint 2.2 / Ubuntu 7.04 mash first. This in essence removed the mash, even while creating a very similar configuration: Mint over the top of Ubuntu 7.04. it is just that the Mint utilities are now fully 7.04 ready.

Once that was complete, I did a clean install of Mint 3.0 Beta 012 on the T40 test machine.

One of the big changes for Mint 3.0 was the deletion of Evolution, and replacing it with Thunderbird. This makes perfect sense for a consumer oriented Distro, and Evolution can be re-added via Synaptic after the install, so it is not the end of the Distro for me at the office. It was a fun to figure out all the bits that had to be put back on, with the final key being that I had to put the gnome-spell to get the inline spell-checking working.

The T41 Upgrade

Backing up for a second though: Here is how I upgrade the T41.

The T41 has 4 partitions on the hard drive:

1. sda1: 10 GB Windows XP

2. sda2: 9 GB for "/"

3. sda3: 2GB  swap

4. sda4: 33 GB for "/home"

SDA? What is up with that? These are PATA hard drives, not SATA, not SCSI. Quick 'lsmod' shows the SCSI_MOD module is loaded. Not sure why. On my Acer with it's SATA drives, I assumed that it used that SCSI layer to deal with SATA better. Now I think Ubuntu must just load SCSI_MOD by default for everything.

Having sda4-"/home" be separate means that all my personal system set up files are preserved. Things like .mozilla, .gconf, .evolution, etc. They are the same config file that were there from when the laptop was openSUSE 10.2, then Fedora Core 6, then the mash, and now Mint 3.0. This usually is not a problem for any applications excepting Evolution. Any upgrade appears to be trouble for Evolution (and that is another post...).

The Mint 3.0 install is the same as it ever was for the most part. Done Mint or Ubuntu before, you have seen most of this. Boot the LiveCD. Instantly running Mint 3.0. Everything looked OK, so I clicked the "Install" icon.

Here is where a new thing occurs: there used to be 6 dialog boxes to the install. Now there are seven. One of them, the time zone setting, appears to be nearly the same as the way Evolution sets TZ's up internally: presenting maps you click on, which zooms in to let you click on nearby cities in the same time zone.

This is both easy and a bit of a miff: I live no where near Chicago, Illinois, but it the the example CDT city on the graphic. I mix this up sometime in Evolution by picking various Canadian cities that are also in CDT. I am not sure why I need a map: I can type CDT pretty quickly. Whatever. Not that big a deal.

The really new part was when it asked if I wanted to import data from MS Windows on HDA1. I said "yes" out of curiosity, not because there was anything I really needed there. I boot over to XP on the T41 from time to time so that it can contact the Marimba mothership and get any updates and patches and anti-virus stuff it needs to be current, but that is about it.

When the short install was done and I had rebooted the T41, I now had the same background image that I do when I am booted over to XP: A NASA shot of the night landing of the Space Shuttle. It was a little mentally weird, because I had a different NASA shot from the Hubble for Linux, and now they look the same. I reset that back to the Super Nova picture.

So now this computer is an Mint 3.0 beta upgrade to a monster mash with imported MS Windows settings. My brain hurts.

After the reboot, I went into synaptic to put back on all the packages I use that Ubuntu and Mint leave off the install CD:

• X3270 (still a mainframe guy...)

• Evolution (gotta get the MS Exchange calendar still) + gnome-spell and aspell and dictionaries.

• LM Sensors and the Gnome Sensor applet: I like to watch the fan speed and various sensor zone temps.

• The thinkpad special support bits (IBM-ACPI is already installed)

• Gkrellm

• Macutils, hfs+ (My external USB drives are HFS formatted, no journal, so I have to have this)

• Avahi and its gnome panel discovery applet

Once that was all in, and various things reset, the T41 was ready to go. Total set up time was less than an hour, and everything was configured as I like it.

Clean Install on T40

I was curious what a clean install of 3.0 would look like. I have been mashing so long I have not actually done a clean install recently. Not for long anyway.

I had a trashpile IBM T40 that was available for a complete system wipe. Part of the keyboard is dead (pgup / pgdn / keyboard light) part is squinchy (Enter, left click on mouse, couple other keys), and the screen backlight goes away from time to time, but it boots and otherwise works. It is enough like the T41 to make this comparison interesting. The physical case looks to be exactly the same:

Not Apples to Apples, but two very similar computers. I thought this would be interesting at several levels. I have never had such similar hardware that was also this capable. Last test stuff I used were M300's with tiny disks, small RAM, and 500 Mhz processors.

Same thing as before: boot the LiveCD, click "Install". No import of data, since this was a complete hard drive take over. I let it pick the disk layout, and it did not put it up the way I would have. Everything in sda1 and "/", except swap which is in SDA5 and is 1.5 GB.

SDA5?. Weird. Why not SDA2? Why an extended partition (sda2) when the silly thing only has two disk slices. Why is home not separate?

Note to self: pick the disk layout next time. With no MS Windows pre-existing on the T40 to consider (OK: honesty: MS Windows was technically there, I just didn't consider it because after the install, it would be gone), my normal install would have been 3 slices: "/", swap, and "/home". Three primary partitions. I will re-do this when the GA version of Mint is out.

Once Mint was all installed and rebooted, I was facing the default face of Mint. Blue / green colors instead of the Ubuntu beige. Except OpenOffice launches with the "Human" color theme of Ubuntu still. I assume that will be fixed in later versions of Mint, since they always did before. If not, I'll learn how to theme OpenOffice....

I will not here go into my usual rant against SUSE's SLAB interface. If you have read this weblog at all, I think my feelings on SLAB are clear. And they are just feelings. Preferences. Mint has decided to replicate it is look and features, although it is better in my opinion than SLAB. I can navigate it easier than SLAB on OpenSUSE 10.2. That is damning with faint praise for me.

The good news is, It was easy to put back together the default look and feel of Gnome. I wish they would take a page from KDE and prompt on a fresh install which way the user doing the install wants the screen laid out, but at least they did not make it hard to put everything back the way I like it. New task bar (panel in gnome speak) at top, menus added back, various other applets I like.

If it sounds like I set up everything to resemble OS.X... well, that would not be far from wrong.

The Results

The T40 has no internal Wifi card. The applet for selecting networks doesn't appear to work quite right. Even when I jacked in a WiFi PCMCIA card, which it configured and used instantly, the panel applet didn't work. But Wifi-radar does. Weird. Internet appears over the wireless or wired with no real effort. More on WiFi in the rant below.

Speeds are good: All in all, I can not really feel a speed difference between the T40 and the T41. Things launch at the same speed.

Fan runs far more on the T41 than the T40. The Sensor applet reports that the fan actually stops on the T40, and even when it runs, it is going about 6/7's the RPM as the T41. I recently blew out the T41 with some compressed air, and never have done that to the T40. Both systems CPU idle at 600 Mhz. All in all, I think the 1.7 Ghz clock rate makes the T41 run slightly hotter than the 1.5 Ghz T40, which in turn makes me think that the main difference between the two chips is the clock rate. If I overclocked the T40's Pentium-M from 1.5 Ghz to 1.7 Ghz, I bet it would thermal profile out the same as the T41. I assume this means that the T40 is better on battery life.

The Gnome panel applet to control screen backlight brightness works on the T40, but not the T41.

Avahi finds things like printers, but doesn't launch VNCviewer correctly when going to a VNC server. I can see Apples whenever they turn on and off because the Discovery applet reports on them immediately.

NTP whines during setup about both systems: clearly unhappy with not knowing how to deal with "Mint" as a Linux version. when it prompts for the Linux version, tell NTP to act like it's Ubuntu, it works fine.

Built in Beryl

With two working systems on the desk, one of my first things to try was to enable Beryl, and then disable Beryl and enable 'desktop effects' from the menu, which I believe is Compiz. Here is the weird part: works fine on the older T40. Works not at all on the new T41. I am pretty sure that the video memory for the T41 is not large enough to deal with the 1400x1050 screen, giving a slight advantage to the older slower lower rez hardware. Kind of funny.

Beryl looks great on the T40 screen. Seems to be less buggy about layers than it used to be under Ubuntu 6.10. I quit using it there because the "Trailfocus" was always confused about who should be in front, and who should be faded. The Apple-expose-like "scale" effect I use all the time already. Its even activated on f9, just like my Macs!

I can achieve working Beryl on the T41, if I change /etc/X11/xorg.cong to force the screen to use 1024x768 mode.  Then I loose all the lovely resolution, and the smooth round looking fonts.

Font anti-aliasing was not on by default on the T40, and it was on after the migration on the T41... but I had that set on before. Not sure I get that: LCD's really need this on. Mint knows this is a laptop.

IBM WiFi card lockout

I have ranted here about laptop vendors locking out end users from installing whichever 802.11 card they would like. I singled out HP before, when I first found out about this on a new HPQ V5101 (now my sons collage computer, since he doesn't really care about things like this...), and noted back then that I had heard IBM's do the same thing.

Sadly, I can now confirm that. I did a bit more research, and it appears that IBM may have been doing the lock-out longer than HP even.

The T40 came with an empty Mini-PCI slot, but with the 802.11 antenna wires ready to go. The card slot is a bit of a pain to get to, as I had to take out the keyboard, and then the palm rest cover. Pretty standard Thinkpad construction though. Way easier to get into and out of than most laptops.

Once apart, I snapped in the Broadcom card that used to be in an eMachines 5312. I know it works with Linux. Used it in the 5312 with Linux.

The T40 would not boot, issuing a BIOS message saying that an "Unauthorized card" was in the Mini-PCI slot, and to remove it. Same exact thing as an HP. The infamous "BIOS Whitelist". Shades of Windows Activation! Arg! Just who owns this laptop? Apparently IBM still.

I have loved my T41 over the years. It has given me great service. When it died with a broken video card a while back, I was bereft. It came with the Atheros card, and that card has always worked with Linux. But this verification of BIOS card whitelisting means now that IBM joins HP as one of my last choices when I personally buy a laptop. Not that I'll need one anytime soon: the Acer 5610 is working great. But as a purchasing decision, this is a big black mark with me. It is sad, because in many ways I think HP and IBM (OK: Lenovo) both make superior laptop hardware.

This probably matters less than it used to though: even the least expensive laptops out there come with WiFi cards standard. It is just that if one breaks, my spare parts are worthless for those two vendors.

To be fair, Apple doesn't let just anyone jack in a WiFi Card to their laptops either. And I have a pile of those Apples at the house. Such a hypocrite.

I am applying Linux standards of openness to laptops that were designed to run a close source OS. Double standard. Not fair? Probably. But I run Linux on this kind of hardware, not that other OS, and so I need to try and be sure I support the vendors that support the platform I use.

I jacked in the venerable Linksys WPC11 Version 3 PCMCIA card (Orinoco chipset), and it is "on the air".  Just not a pretty as it would be with the internal card was in place. Nor as fast: the Broadcom is a B/G card. The Linksys is B only.

Mint doesn't care either way. It just works.

I'm looking forward to 3.0 GA.