A disclaimer.. I’ve set up Sane on Ubuntu and OpenSuse so this wasn’t my first time trying it.. On OpenSuse I had very little trouble, Yast tends to make things easy, but I had some other issues that I wasn’t interested in tracking down.. and so.. I decided to get my feet wet in Debian 6 since I know it’s gonna trickle down into my life anyhow..

What I’m running all this with:

1. A beat up old Gateway Laptop with a sparse 512mb of Ram and some manner of Athlon processor.. this machine is mostly usable, but the ac adapter plug is a little wonky, and has to be held in place to keep the power on.. well.. as I was once told.. “if you can’t fix it.. Duck it.”  A GENEROUS amount of Black Duct Tape has mostly resolved this issue.

2. A Canon Pixma MP160 MultiFunction Machine. I of course am sharing this machine via CUPS to all the *nix machines in the house.

3. My home network is 192.168.2.0/24  and has about 10 ish or so network devices and only about 5 of which will ever scan, the rest being other stuff.

ON THE SERVER

I install Sane and Sane utils with:

sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils

after you install this you must edit the following files:

/etc/sane.d/saned.conf and add the line 192.168.2.0/24 to allow access from my network to these machines.

/etc/default/saned and the # Set to yes to start saned must be set to RUN=yes

NOTE: I had an additional step, to fix a bug with probably only my particular scanner, but you may run into this.. I had to add the saned user on this machine to the lp group to gain access across the network.

ON THE CLIENTS..

On Linux you do the following:

You Install SANE the same way you do on the server. (I’m a debian guy but the config is the same on any nix system.)

sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils

and you edit this file

/etc/sane.d/net.conf

to contain the ip of the server or it’s resolved server name, which is what I do.

192.168.2.20

if you set it up right, you should be able to use something like..

scanimage -T on the client and you will hear your scanner whir to life and test your device.

In Linux I like using Simple Scan or X-Sane to scan with, But any Sane capable software will work. They don’t require you to configure the application. In Gimp there isn’t native scanning functionality, but never fear, you can make a symbolic link of the xsane binary to the gimp plugins directory under your user’s home. (Thanks to this Link)

todd@gojira:~$ ln -s /usr/local/bin/xsane /home/todd/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/

On a Mac Client I follow these insructions: http://www.ellert.se/twain-sane/ You must install each of those applications per your version of OSX, and then you can open the Sane conifuration pane, and configure the “net” the same way you’d configure it for Linux, by adding the server’s IP address. If you have Photoshop on this mac it will use Sane to Acquire an image if you so desire.

On Windows: As you can imagine with most *nix projects.. windows versions are available.. but are sort of under-developed, it’s like a square peg in a round hole.. however… xsane32 exists for windows. It’s rather old, but is mostly functional.

I was playing around with the CLI page that XKCD put up on April Fools.. and I ran accross this when looking at random comics.

A few months ago I was pinged by my companies security dept, I had sent a blank xls document to a gmail account and they wanted to know why, after explaining I was doing some testing of the secure mail we have, I was asked to among other things.. run a spyware check on my machine at home.. They send a zip file with some spyware software to scan a windows machine, I advised I had many machines, and non ran windows..and I’m pretty sure I was smug about it.

I don’t remember now if i ran the spyware check under wine or not, but they didn’t press the issue.

I use Mint which was begat by Ubuntu, which in turn was begat by Debian.  This weekend I’m going to move from Linux Mint 8 KDE Edition (which is based on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic) to Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid, which is an LTS release of Ubuntu running KDE.   I don’t mind using Mint at all but I feel like I’m a bit of a different user than I was a year ago.. who knows in 5 years I might be a Linux from Scratch guy.. rofl.. riiiight..

So this weekend I’ll be:

Backup up anything from my installation drive to other places.

Documenting things I may have running on my Linux box that need to be reinstalled / set up on the new installation.

Then wiping and installing. Because I don’t do upgrade installations.. EVER.

I recently found a set of Podcasts by a German Teacher who speaks pretty good english named Rolf Steinort. His site is called Meet The Gimp. He posts tutorials on many of the features and bugs in Gimp, I’ve been listening to them for a while and it’s opened my mind to what can be done with Gimp and Photo manipulation..  I’d suggest if you are interested since Gimp is free and lets face it you can’t keep torrenting that Pirated copy of Adobe forever.. You try it..

It’s Pretty Solid. I expected issues but it ran smooth, I’m on a Quad Core machine so I have no idea how it would run on a lesser machine.

It has a great anime selection, many of them in Japanese which is how I prefer it. And it’s Free. So.. I Suggest if you have a pc and love to watch TV on your own terms but don’t necessarily want to deal with cable or a DVR, give Hulu desktop a try.

Step #1 in the Firefox Address Bar type about:config and press enter. You’ll see a warning message.  It will say things like “This might void your Warranty!” click the “I’ll be careful” ad don’t be a Nancy.  (my apologies to my Aunt Nancy.. I’m not insinuating you are lame.)

Step #2 Search for the following “values” and change them (Double clicking on them will allow you to change them)

Search for the item on the left Change to the value on the right
network.dns.disableIPv6  FALSE
network.http.pipelining  TRUE
network.http.proxy.pipelining  TRUE
http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 instead of 4

Step #3 Right click anyplace in the body of the config and select “new” and then “integer” then create the following entries (whats on the left is the “name of the integer” the number is the “value”)

content.notify.backoffcount 5
nglayout.initialpaint.delay  0
ui.submenuDelay  0

Step #4 Restart Firefox

So around-ish February.. when I was full on Florida.. we asked Sydney’s folks to give us the huge box of unorganized photos they have so I could scan them and put them online.

The task was daunting.. but here is how I overcame: Batch scanning. I used Linux, or course, and scanned the full width and breadth of my scanner at 600 dpi which was it’s max resolution, I later lowered it to 300 since the quality of the scan was beating the quality of the print by a very wide margin.  I’d scan “sets” into X-Sane, then seperate them using Gimp.

I’m happy to say.. that this weekend after months of not really working on it at all.. I completed the scanning part of the project, right now I’m separating the pictures and then they will be available in the Family Gallery.  I’m not entirely certain how many pictures there will be total, but I scanned in about 800 this weekend.

-Todd

MS Office isn’t Free.. the student / teacher version is over $100 and some versions are far more expensive.. it also introduces closed standards.. and very few features in every new release (at the very least.. ones you are likley to use.)

Here are a couple of  FREE Alternatives to MS Office.

OpenOffice.org – easily the best, this set of programs runs on any OS and is completley free and open source. It is compatible for the most part with all native office formats.

Lotus Symphony – I can’t say I’ve used this application, but it’s from IBM and seems pretty promising.. I’ll have to give it a shot sometime.

Google Docs – this is “cloud computing” essentially you create your files and edit and store them online.. this works out better than you’d think

Don’t need a Full Office Suite? Just need something like Word?

AbiWord – it’s pretty old school.. but it’s a good word processor.

If you take inventory of what you do online on with a PC these day’s it’s easy to see you spend less time in an application and more time using a browser..  this is easily a sign of things to come.