The time has come again for installing my laptop over from scratch. My goal is to take notes as I go through and capture what I do in case it might help others, or if nothing else, my notes will help me remember what I did.
So, here’s my first post of notes…
These are just some quick notes on the various Java programs that I install. I’m sorry the notes are not very complete. I’ll do better next time, but I thought these notes might still have some value.
In following up with my encryption experiments, I wanted to use the same virtual machine to do some backup experiments. Here’s the basic thought: I want to use the Redo Backup & Recovery CD to make an image of my virtual machine. Then, I want restore that image on a brand new virtual machine.
It’s pretty straight forward. Here are my notes…
Because of some increased security demands, I decided that I need to explore and understand encrypted home directories. First, I want to see it work where I can’t see the information from a Live CD. Second, I want to make sure that I can still get to the information in case I have to rescue it from a Live CD.
So, here’s my experimentation…
On my Ubuntu 13.04 installation, I have had trouble getting the touchpad to work. The driver just wouldn’t install. I finally figured it out.
I have an old article about installing the scanner driver for our Brother MFC 8840D Fax/Scanner/Copier/Printer. That was when things were simpler. Brother hasn’t kept up to date on their drivers, so I am updating this article.
I downloaded the driver from Brother’s Website. Mine uses the brscan driver, not the brscan2. You can tell which one to use based on the model number listed on the download page.
I tried to install with the Ubuntu Software Center. It gives you some error messages when you do that. The official instructions say that you are supposed to install it like this:
sudo dpkg --force-all -i brscan-0.2.4-0.amd64.deb
I added my printer using this command:
brsaneconfig -a name=BrotherScanner model="MFC-8840D" ip=192.168.168.168
To make sure that it installed, look at the bottom of the output of this command:
brsaneconfig -q
Now, after all of that, it wouldn’t work. Come to find out, it puts the library files in the wrong directory. Thanks to Chargen, I found an easy fix:
for driver in /usr/lib64/sane/*; do sudo ln -s $driver /usr/lib/sane/$(basename $driver); done
And, run this one, too.
for lib in /usr/lib64/libbrscandec.so*; do sudo ln -s $lib /usr/lib/$(basename $lib); done
That fixed the problem!
I have played with Festival before. It will easily generate speech from written commands. It seems pretty full featured. But, I have always wanted to add pitch. Could I make it sing the words?
I found a cool little trick today. The file permissions are making git think that the file changed. There is a simple command that tells it to ignore those changes:
git config core.filemode false
A while ago, I ran across the brackets development environment. It looked really awesome, particularly the part about dynamically updating the page as you edit it. When I first heard about it, the Linux version was not quite out yet. Now, they have a package and everything for easy installation. So, here’s a first post about what I found.
