Sharing the Xerox 6125 N With Linux clients

In this post I will describe how to share a Xerox 6125 or 6125N printer with a Linux machine through a windows host.

The Xerox 6125 (or 6125N) is an amazing deal - a 300$ network-enabled color laser printer.
Unfortunately, this great price tag comes with one major downside - absolutely no linux compatibility WHATSOEVER.
The Xerox 6125 uses a Host Based PDL and as opposed to most Xerox machines - does not support Postscript or PCL printing languages. Xerox has not released any proprietary drivers for it, and for this reason the Open printing database has categorized it as a paperweight.

There is, however, a way around this - if you have at least one windows machine on your network. By creating a virtual postscript printer, and routing its output to the Xerox 6125 through the windows driver - you can share the printer with any machine capable of printing postscript - namely any major Linux distribution (and mac-os X of course!).

Henrik Schmiediche has written a great guide to setting up a virtual gostscript printer on your windows machine - wich can be found here or mirrored in PDF format here.
Once you have set up your virtual postscript printer, and shared it over the network - set up your linux clients to print to it - either using the same driver as the virtual printer, or the generic "Raw Queue" driver (The HP Color Laserjet 4550 PS suggested in the article works great - make sure you use the postscript version of the driver!).

Configuring Lenovo 3000 N100 sound card on Linux

I just got a new Lenovo Laptop, the Lenovo 3000 N100 0768-FSG to be exact. I installed SUSE 10.2, and also played around with a Ubuntu 7.04 live cd - neither of which recognized the sound-card. Actually, the sound card was recognized, and configured with the snd-hda-intel driver - but the speakers simply didn't work, neither did headphones.

I solved this in SUSE 10.2 by manually updating the ALSA drivers from the bundled 1.0.14 version to the 1.0.15rc3 development version - this required manual compilation, and installing my distributions kernel source package. The latest ALSA drivers can be found at www.alsa-project.org.

Instructions for installing the latest ALSA drivers from source can be found here, you will only need the alsa-driver package to get the sound working on your laptop, the rest of the packages should have been bundled with your linux distribution and do not require updating.

There are several sites that report getting the sound to work by adding one of the following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo
options snd-hda-intel model=laptop-eapd
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack
And then restarting the sound module. Different lines seem to work for different ALSA versions, and different Lenovo 3000 or other intel powered laptop models. so you might want to try some of these before installing the development drivers.

In SUSE this can also be accomplished by running YaST -> Hardware -> Sound, selcting your sound card and clicking "Edit" you will be able to set the mode option to any of the above there.

UPDATE: On open SuSE 10.3, the sound card works out of the box!

Image previews not showing up in konqueror and kFlickr

I just got a new digital camera, and was annoyed that for some odd reason, konqueror and kFlickr were no longer showing image previews for pictures taken with the new camera.

The solution for this problem was simple - apparently, konqueror has a configureable limit to the size of file it displays previews of. This setting can easily be changed in konqueror through:
Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Previews & Meta Data -> Maximum file size.

Turns out, that all the pictures from my 2 Mega Pixel cellphone camera were under 1MB in size, while the pictures from my new digital camera (set at 3 Mega Pixels) were just over 1MB. The default setting for previewable file size in my distribution was 1MB - hence the problem.

Changing the settings in konqueror also immediately solved the problem in kFlickr.

Flickr upload tool for KDE

After shelling out 25$ for a flickr account I needed a Linux based uploading tool. After several unsuccessful attempt to install FlickrUploadr for Linux by Michele Campeotto, and Flickrfs - i finally stumbled upon a blog post by Phil Wilson that solved all my problems:

Kflickr is a simple, efficient and easy to install Flickr uploading tool for the Linux KDE desktop environment. Supports tags, descriptions privacy settings and batch operations - most importantly, it has saved me from the horror of the Flickr Upload page.

I'm putting up this post, since it took me quiet a while to find Phil's page and Kflickr, I'm hoping this page will make it a bit easier.