Issues with Linux Mint (or Debian Linux) and Xsane

#notetoself

So, today, I was playing around with a new PC setup. And of course there was an issue with the HP Scanner. - I generally use Xsane vs Simple Scanner. Both of them had issues connecting to the Scanner with an I/O error. Simple enough. I had hopped that the printer being found and usable by default, that the scanner would also work. Nope.   I got

Failed to open device 'hpaio:/net/hp_laserjet_pro_mfp_m125nw?ip=192.168.1.1&queue=false':Error during device I/O

I found the answer again, here.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/153746/xsane-failed-to-open-device-hpaio-net-photosmart-c5100-serieszc-hp5180-err

I'm sure I've run into this issue before, and used this or another post like this to resolve the issue.  LOL, Basically, you've got to DL a plugin from HP and agree to their software terms.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also for me, I found that I needed to adjust the Xsane settings again. - I DID have my other computer to see what the settings were. :)

Also, don't forget to setup the 0000's for the filename, and location. 

#notetoself

Janet Noseworthy 1967 - 2021

 

 

 

 

 

She was perfect for me. - She will be missed. 

 

Obituary of Janet Noseworthy

Janet L. Noseworthy (nee Bissett), 54, of Lorain, died Friday, June 25, 2021 at Mercy Regional Medical Center after recovering from a stroke and pneumonia.

She was born January 23, 1967 in Lorain and had been a life long Lorain area resident.

Janet had worked in the lab at Elyria Memorial Hospital prior to becoming the manager at the Super 8 Motel, Westlake and Elyria were she had worked for 15 years.

She enjoyed crossword puzzles, drawing, crafts, woodworking with her dad, traveling, and cooking.  She especially enjoyed spending time with her cat gNibbles and her family.  

She is survived by her husband of 12 years, Randall Noseworthy of Lorain; mother, Mary Lou (nee Crouse) Bissett of Lorain; daughters, Kayla Marti of Elyria and Ashley Edmonson of Elyria; grandchildren, Autumn, Madison, and Hazel; brothers, Steven Bissett of Amherst and Bruce (Denise) Bissett of Lorain; and her sisters, Dusty (Thomas) Birrittieri of Lewisville, NC, Wendy (Laurence Solak) Bissett of Oberlin, Tracy (Rob Kaderbek) Paluch of Amherst, and Donna Bissett of Lorain.

She was preceded in death by her father, Charles H. Bissett Jr. and her infant brother, Timothy Duane Bissett. 

The family will receive friends on Thursday, July 1, 2021 from 5:00 pm until the time of a memorial service at 6:00 pm at the Riddle Funeral Home, 5345 South Street, Vermilion, Ohio. 

The family suggests memorial contributions to  Friendship Animal Protective League, 8303 Murray Ridge Road, Elyria, OH, 44035  .

Online condolences may be made at www.riddlefuneralhome.com.

https://riddlefuneralhome.com/tribute/details/3052/Janet-Noseworthy/obituary.html#tribute-start

It would mean a lot to me if you were to leave a comment on the Tribute Wall.

Raspberry Pi Zero setup for Motion Eye

First off, I'd like to say thanks to  Calin Crisan for his work on Motion eye. He's posted a few how to's on his Github page. This page is a modified version of his page. I've found the following method to work a bit more smoothly for me. Your Millage May vary. Before you go further, this post assumes that you know about installing Raspbian on your SD card, and have access to your Pi Zero via SSH.

I'm installing Motion eye on a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

In this example Raspbian Buster Lite is already installed on it.  I used 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-lite.zip for my install. It also needs to be setup headlessly to use SSH.  I wrote a little post about that here. 

 Before Proceeding

    Read Calin Crisan's general Installation page first.

These instructions are intended for an up-to-date Raspbian Buster install, but they should work for Raspbian Stretch as well.

    All commands require root; use sudo before each command or become root using sudo -i.
    If you want to use the CSI camera module for the Raspberry PI, make sure you have enabled it in raspi-config.  Also don't forget to run Apt Update and Apt Upgrade if doing this on a fresh install of buster.



Instructions

Install ffmpeg and other motion dependencies:

apt install ffmpeg libmariadb3 libpq5 libmicrohttpd12

I still needed to run apt update --fix-missing to get all the packages to install when I used this method. Lately, I have not had to. 

Install the dependencies from the repositories including "python-pil instead" of python-pillow, and selecting 'zlib1g-dev' instead of 'libz-dev'. 

apt install python-pip python-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev python-pil

Once all of the packages for ffmpeg and motion dependencies are install, proceed to install Motion.

 Install  motion:

wget https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion/releases/download/release-4.2.2/pi_buster_motion_4.2.2-1_armhf.deb
dpkg -i pi_buster_motion_4.2.2-1_armhf.deb

Install motioneye, which will automatically pull Python dependencies (tornado, jinja2, pillow and pycurl):

pip install motioneye

Prepare the configuration directory:

mkdir -p /etc/motioneye
cp /usr/local/share/motioneye/extra/motioneye.conf.sample /etc/motioneye/motioneye.conf

Prepare the media directory:

mkdir -p /var/lib/motioneye

Add an init script, configure it to run at startup and start the motionEye server:

cp /usr/local/share/motioneye/extra/motioneye.systemd-unit-local /etc/systemd/system/motioneye.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable motioneye
systemctl start motioneye

To upgrade to the newest version of motionEye, just issue:

pip install motioneye --upgrade
systemctl restart motioneye

These instructions were modified from the original found here:

https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye/wiki/Install-On-Raspbian

https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye/wiki/Installation

Setting up a Raspberry Pi Zero W for Headless Use on Linux

This shouldn't take to long, and it's fairly simple to do. But if you're a novice and don't know about it, it might drive you crazy trying to figure this out.  And that's not the kind of crazy that is good for anyone.

This assumes that you've already figured out how you're going to get your Pi's SD card imaged.  I use BalenaEtcher myself.  There is dd and other methods a person can use.

Once the SD card is imaged you'll need to create an empty file on the Boot Partition called ssh.
Just right click in your file manager to create an empty document called ssh. 

Now you'll need to right click again to create a document, but you'll want to call it  wpa_supplicant.conf in that file you'll need your wifi network login information. Open that in Pluma or Nano or whatever your default text editor is, and put these lines below in in. Edited of course, with the correct SSID and Password for your Wifi network.  

country=US
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
 ssid="SenturyLink"
 psk="Passw0rds"
}

Save this file, making sure that it's named correctly and in the \boot partition of the SD card. At this point you can eject the SD card from your PC.

Next you're going to SSH into the Pi from the terminal on you Linux machine.

What I found easiest was to log into my router and get the IP address of connected devices.  It might take a little time, so be patient. 

I have also used an Android App called Fing,  and you can also use nmap. But my router info does the trick for me. Once you have figured out what the IP address is for your Raspberry Pi Zero W, you need to open up a terminal to SSH into it.The Default username is pi and default password is raspberry. 

yourname@linuxpc:~$ ssh pi@192.168.1.17

pi@192.168.1.17's password:raspberry

If all has gone well, you've now successfully logged into your Pi Zero over Wifi!
For your initial log in you'll get a security warning. Say Yes to it.

Now would be a good time to run raspi-config  now that you've logged into it to change your default password, and expand the file system if needed.
You'll also want to run
Apt Update and  Apt Upgrade 
to get your machine up to date with it's packages.


That's pretty much it. You should have a Raspberry Pi Zero W that you can SSH into.

I've used this method a few times to get my Pi's setup for use with MotionEye. I've modified the original process with my own blog post on how to get Motion Eye installed and going, the original seemed to have a couple of steps out of order. 

I'd like to say that I took most of my information for this blog post from Mitch Allen's post about how to do this via Windows.

Weather Clock HTML

Ever since I cut the cord, and hooked up a PC to my TV, I've always liked a nice Weather Clock display for those times I'm not watching TV and am listening to the radio (I like 181.fm by the way).

If you've been a Chrome user you might have seen some of the "New Tab" Clock and weather gadgets that have been built over the past couple of years.  A popular one E Clock, I think it was, worked really well and it had the coolness of offering up quite a few nice backgrounds to go with it.  But as of the 1st of this year it quit loading the weather. There is also Currently, and it's working at the moment.  But it has stopped from time to time. 

I grew tired of relying on someone else's tool, and I knew it shouldn't be toooo hard to make a web page to show the time and weather, right? I mean, I messed around with web pages back when there was a Netscape editor for them, and Front Page was destroying everything that you opened up to edit, so you ended up editing things with a text editor and holding your breath that FP wasn't going to destroy your pages. It was sorta ok if you only used it.  It's such garbage, that there is even a tool to remove it's bloat. BLECH!

So far this little HTML page that I created seems to work. The Weather Widget gets it's info from DarkSky.  But if you want to use another widget you can.  So even if this one breaks or whatever, there's more weather widgets out there to fiddle with I suppose.   In any case, this mostly your own code to fiddle with as you see fit.  If you come up with some snazzy new things to do to it, or have better code, please share.  I in no way see myself as some well informed web page developer, rather I've got limited knowledge to get me just this far.  I'm just fair  enough to fiddle with some things here and there and get them to work.

In any case, I've got the orginal code for this saved on the TryIt editor.  I have saved it here:  I have also saved it to my Google Drive here.

If you DL the HTML code, just save it on your PC  \home\weather_clock\clock.html or someplace like that.  You'll need to go to weatherwidget.io to get the code for your area and replace my widget code with your favorite Text Editor. This code should work with anyone's PC and any modern browser.

There's still a few things that I'm not exactly "happy" with this. As of the moment, I have to ZOOM in the page to 200 - 250%  to get it to fill the page up the way I want to.  I'm sure there's a way to fix this, but it's not really a huge problem, but I'm not exactly sure how to address it at this time. 

I Have also made some changes to the mentioned code so that I can have a nicer background, but  again, I have to ZOOM in and the background image also zooms.  Not sure that I really like that.

I'm sure some of this code could be cleaned up, but hey, not bad for amature. IMHO.  

R_ 

Where are 'vino-preferences'?

So, earlier today, I'm having an issue with Ubuntu MATE 18.04  after I installed Vino.  In the past I've been able to just use vino-preferences from within the command line, and the little configuration window pops up and allows me to set it up so that I can remote into a machine without having to have someone at the other end "OK" the log in.

I tried to install the gnome-control-center so that could get the preferences to pop up. As VINO did install, and I did successfully get it to run at startup.  I just needed to tweak it a little bit to get it set up the way that I needed, and as far as I was concerned I could uninstall the gnome control center if it got in the way.

So, I come across the dconf-editor, in fact, I'm sure that I've used it in the past 4-5 years, but I totally forgot about it. (Slap on the forehead) It would seem that some of the Raspberry Pi users have had this same kind of issue.   Simple fix once you figure it out. This little fix doesn't allow for you to change the password for the remote user (I didn't look to see if there was a fix for that) as I was planning on using the default password.

sudo apt-get install vino dconf-editor 
confirm with y
type:
dconf-editor
This opens a window on your laptop with dconf-editor
go to:
org ==> gnome ==> desktop ==>remote-access
uncheck prompt-enabled
uncheck require-encryption

You can also access it via the MATE menu later, if you need to tweak something else.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=122007
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vino
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vino

#notetoself
#Ubuntu_Mate_18.04

For the Love of Goo, The World of Goo.

As many of you may know, I've been helping out Ken Starks with his passion of a project called Reglue.  I've been honored to be able to contribute to that project with the Respining of Linux Mint, and Kubuntu for his needs.  Reglue's been given the rights to take the World of Goo and put it into their desktop distro for the computers that are going out to the Reglue Kids. But somewhere along the line, (Ubuntu 12.10?) the game would install, but nothing happened when you'd go to run it.

** Crickets. ** 

Segmentation Fault 

Computers screens went black, and there was a massive gnashing of teeth.

One person, Alan, whet so far as to creating a great script (something that I wouldn't have been able to do as well has he did). He did a fantastic job.

MOM4Evr posts a how to fix it here (I'm sure there are others, but hers came up in my first search) 

http://goofans.com/forum/world-of-goo/support/4780

libogg.so.0 

libvorbis.so.0 

libvorbisfile.so.3

download these 3 files:

http://2dboy.com/TopSecretTransfer/linux-libs64/

or:

http://2dboy.com/TopSecretTransfer/linux-libs32/

and replace those in

gksu nautilus /opt/WorldOfGoo/libs64/

or

gksu nautilus /opt/WorldOfGoo/libs32/

But what if there was simply an easier way to fix the .deb file, and not have to look for these files, or install them via a long script?  And why hasn't 2DBoy posted this fixed deb file, as it seems so simple to me? I don't have the answer for 2DBoy, but I did figure out the .deb file fix, and would have loved to have just posted the fixed deb file, but it IS a commercial game, so I don't have the liberty to post a link to the fixed file, but I will tell you how to fix it, so you can easily install it on your computer, and it'll be ready to go or whenever you re-install or upgrade your .deb based desktop distro you can just install this and go about other business. 

How to fix the .deb file. 

First you've got to "open it up".  I did this in my home folder. 

mkdir -p extract/DEBIAN

dpkg-deb -x WorldOfGooSetup.1.41.deb extract/

dpkg-deb -e WorldOfGooSetup.1.41.deb extract/DEBIAN  

**[...Copy the three Libs files...]**

Copy those three (Or 6 Library files, if you're going to do all of them) into their proper place in the .deb file that you just extracted.  And then you're done.

Such as  "/home/randy/extract/opt/WorldOfGoo/libs64"

Create your new .deb file. 

mkdir build

dpkg-deb -b extract/ build/

You should have a worldofgoo_1.41_all.deb file in your /home/randy/build folder. 

Now, install it like you would any other .deb file, and you're good to go. 

And before you go, I'd like to mention, that Ken IS currently hosting an indiegogo campaign, Deleting The Digital Divide One Computer at a Time. And even if you find this post AFTER his campaign, your donations would be STILL be MOST WELCOME. 

Droopy = Simple Home Web Server

So, just recently a friend of mine wanted me to check out how Droopy worked.  He had a busy day, and besides checking out this utility should take two people, or someone that has two ways to access the internet. I'm just doing a little update on what I found, and to answer some questions about how it's setup and used.  The page where I downloaded it from had enough information that even I could extrapolate how to get it setup and used.  This post is mainly to answer some of the questions that the setup page might have left unanswered.  http://stackp.online.fr/?p=28

I supposed that I ought to mention, that I am doing this on a Linux Mint 13 (LTS) MATE PC. I'm not sure if that will make a difference, but there is a possibility that if you're using something else, your experience will differ. Certainly your file manager might not be Caja, but most of the file managers allow you to do the same things.

As stated on the setup page, you can download (this opens in a new browser window) this is the text file that IS droopy. Just right click and save the file as droopy. I opened up Caja as root, as I knew I was going to need root access to change the file permissions, and to make it executable. I copied the droopy file to the /bin dir, and changed the permissions, and checked the box to make it executable. I did made the mistake of giving the file a .py extension, but it doesn't seem to need that.

You might also want to use an avatar.png file like the ones below, as the setup page suggests. It's up to you of course.

     

At this point you should be able to run droopy. I also created a /uploads folder off of my home folder. Open your terminal, and run the droopy command in your uploads dir like so:

$ droopy -m "Hey, it's randy. You can send me a file." -p ~/avatar.png

I was able to click on the http://localhost:8000 in my terminal, to bring up the web page as others should see it, and there's a handy bar at the top of the page that you can click on to get your web page address. That's the address that you want to share with others to get to your computer.

Mind you, you have to make sure that your router allows this. For this, you'll have to know your router's settings and how to allow others past your firewall.  If it's just going to be a one time deal, I suppose one could take the risk, and pull their whole firewall down, but I'd not recommend it.

If all goes well, and you don't have a friend to try this out on, you can always do what I did, and test it out with your phone.  :)

In any case, I had some fun testing this out, and learning a few things.  I hope this can be of some use to someone, and leave a comment if you're so inclined, or a note to me over on G+

R_ 

Don't become unglued, become part of Reglue.

[Edited and Updated to Reflect Changes in the main .iso file]

I'm honored to be able to freely contribute to the Reglue project.
(Humble bow) 

For What it's worth, the official OS of Reglue is SolusOS.

I've done up a re-spun Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon LTS DVD .iso file for the Reglue project. What this rather large .iso file has in it is a few extra educational packages vs the Stock Mint LTS DVD.  Oh, and I did take the liberty of putting a different desktop background on it that I fiddled into existence with the help of the GIMP. 

If you want something smaller for that old PC that doesn't do USB Boots or only has a CD Rom, I also created a smaller CD sized .iso of Mint 13 that you can get here. I Know I Removed:

LibreOffice-core, Tomboy Notes, Mono-Common, Java-Common, Braseo, Thunderbird, Banshee, and the GIMP. (On an offhand note, if you're looking for a 'buntu distro that fits on CD, you might want to take a look at Peppermint.) I highly suggest that you re-install the Java-Common packages, after install, even if you're not a LibreOffice user.

On Both of my re-spin Disks the user name is mint with a blank password.

Username: mint 

Password: 

You'll get the Gnome Classic Desktop by default. And, you'll have to use the terminal to exit the the Gnome Fallback mode, as it doesn't have a log off button ANYWHERE by default. Why that is, is beyond me, but it seem to be a horrible oversight. Horrible.
But you can exit the session with the command line [ gnome-session-quit ] to get to the login screen. 

You can choose a different desktop session from the log on screen, so if you don't get Cinnamon by default, try logging on with Cinnamon enabled. After all that was the point of this adventure, was for me to respin Mint 13 LTS with more packages installed by default, so that Ken / Reglue.org wouldn't have to install them on their project. 

If you plan on installing the larger disk .iso in a VM keep in mind that you'll have to adjust the default disk size from 8 gig to at least 9.

Some of the packages installed are

Google Chrome
Clementine
Audacity
Alarm-Clock
Cups-PDF
Gcompris
Tux Math
Tux typing
Inkscape
Play On Linux
Wine
Wine Tricks
Edubuntu  for Grade schooler
Solarium

And a few more, I didn't keep track of all of them. :/   One note of caution, due to having enabled the backports is that upgrading might seem a bit convoluted, once installed, run mintupdate, twice. If you make the mistake that I did, I logged back on with the Gnome Classic desktop and found myself with nothing more than the Computer Icon, and Home folder Icon. Luckily the right click on the desktop brought up the terminal in Nemo, so I could log off. Then log in with the Cinnamon Desktop. You might also want to make sure that you've upgraded the 

I did find that many of the file associations were not quite right either. Not sure if there was a way to fix that readily from Mintconstuctor, but it would be a good thing to fix. The Good and Bad of the new desktop is that I found that my Wallpapers weren't there by default any longer. They're easy enough to add, but it's still a sniggly pain. There are more wallpapers in the \root\reglue folder. A Ctrl-Right Click will allow you to add them at one time. Not sure if updating or DL the Theme's packages again would fix that issue for the default wallpapers. I think it might. One of the new features in the wallpaper options is to be able to chose a gradient background of two colors. I included two transparent backgrounds in the \reglue-extra folder along with some others so one could take advantage of that.  I can only get the desktop to resize properly in Gnome Classic mode, so here's a screenshot of that.

You can grab the larger Reglue LTS CinaNemo.iso here.

Enjoy! Comments here or on G+ are welcome. 

The Untouted Tech of Vcards and QR Codes

This is a QR Code, This one holds vCard info.

I've got a question for you. Well, actually, I might have more than one.

1. When was the last time that you used a vCard?  
2. Do you know what they are? 
3. Have you explained them to anyone else? 
4. Have you sent or received them? 
5. And, would you know how to share export/import them? 

vCards are a great little text files of contact information, if you want to really get into the study of them you might want to check out the wiki page about them.

QR codes can hold vCard info in an image, and with the proper bar-code scanner on your phone you can import the above image with the same info as the vCard. Very handy.  In fact, while writing this, I scanned the above info into my phone from the QR Code above.  It showed up on my phone as:

Ken Starks
Reglue
307 Ferguson Street
Taylor
Tx
76574
512-269-3115
ken@reglue.org
reglue.org

But I'm digressing into QR Code info, vs the old vCard text file.

OK, back to the vCard stuff, and why they're important and how they're different and better is some ways than a QR Code. vCards are still used in the old feature phones, and they're easy to text to someone. They're also easy to export (backup) them to an SD card or on your computer.  This can also be very useful if you've got a friend or family member that DIDN'T back up their info, and lost all of their contacts. Maybe even yourself. You can text or email them selected .vcf files from your computer and they'll be able to easily import those shared contacts (other family members perhaps?) into their phone. Keep in mind that if they have a lowly feature phone that texting them the info might be easiest way to share contacts vs email. Speaking of email one can also import vcard contacts into Gmail.

If you were to open up a vCard in your text editor you'll see that it looks something like this.

There's not a lot to them. It's worth the extra time and effort to get to know your phone so you can share them.  Granted a QR code and Barcode scanner might be the easiest way to import contacts, but when was the last time you had a folder full of QR Codes to scan or share?  Yea, me neither. 

There's plenty of sites to create QR codes, etc.  I used Moongate to create the above code. Are there better sites? Why?

So again, I will ask, when was the last time that you used a vCard or scanned a random QR Code?

Ditched By Kate - Album Release.

One of my favorite people that I've met online has been Phil Rossi  (G+). I recall trying to listen to an a live streaming interview with him. I don't even know who was doing the interview, but this was pre-smartphone days, and I was trying to catch the stream while trucking through the bowels of Mississippi on my laptop and Sprint CDMA dongle.  I was able to catch most of it.  At the time, I think that Phil was celebrating the end of his book Crescent. (Amazon, and Podiobook) versions.

I'm not sure how  or when Phil and I connected, but Twitter comes to mind, but needless to say we conversed. Out of those conversations he also wrote a chapter in his Notes From the Vault Episode 15 (Audio) about a truck driver that get's stranded.  Phil asked me for some input to help him out on it, and I did.  He gave me a little nod with that, and I'm forever flattered.

Well, now, it's time for me to give a little nod to him, and his band, Ditched by Kate.  I'm not sure how Phil is able to have any kind of sanity, being a talented as he is, and his mind must be racing with ideas and talent, as he's also a very, VERY accomplished musician.

I for one, will be looking forward his bands release on April 4th.  It'll be available in all of the normal places.  I'll grab my via Google Play, but that's because I'm more of a Googler then anything else.  Please visit their site(s), and listen to and DL some of their soulful music.  They've got some weirdly cool tunes, and some good boogie woogie butt bumping tunes. Each track that I was able to listen to on their site sounded fresh, and well done.

Phil, and the rest of the Gang. Well done. Well done.
R_

Diggin' Salix 14.0 Xfce

One of my G+ buddies recently mentioned Salix OS, a Slackware Based Distro the other day, as he was putting it on some old hardware.  This was just about a week before a hard drive died on an old 256 MB P4 Laptop, that serves as a digital picture frame, and sometimes doubles as a remote "stereo" unit in our living room.

This laptop had been running Xubuntu on it, as I had wanted a light distro for this older hardware, but even that seemed a little heavy.  Another one of the challenges this machine poses, is that it doesn't have DVD drive, just CD-ROM, nor does it support booting off of a USB. It has only one 1.0 USB port on it.  So after searching Distrowatch for another distro, I decided on Salix. After all, someone else I knew spoke well of it.  I knew that I was going to get outside of my "comfort zone" with something that wasn't  Ubuntu / Debian based.  I figured I was up for the challenge. As it turned out, it wasn't that hard.

Aside from the need for the Broadcom drivers, for the WiFi to work, the install went smooth.  I did the "full" install, and also let it wipe out anything that might be on the drive. Had I not had a network connection via wire, it wouldn't have gone so smooth.

Next came the snigglies and snags for me.  Not having been baptized into Linux via Slackware, etc, and the floppy disk installs of the 90's, some of the struggles some of you long term Linux fans have triumphed over, I had to do some digging and learning to get the the rest of the system setup as I wanted.

I wanted to be able to view this machine via Remote Desktop Viewer on my Linux Mint machine.  After some trial and error, and some more errors, and trials. I got it setup.  I got x11vnc going on it, for it's VNC server. Once I got that installed via GSlapt, and added the proper line for it to autostart I'm now able to access the machine while it sits on the shelf where it normally sits.  For what it's worth, (note to self)  the line that one needs in the Applications Autostart is this:

/usr/bin/x11vnc -repeat -forever

If you don't use the "-repeat -forever"  it'll boot, and start the x11vnc server, but once you exit your first vnc session, it will not start up again. It took me a little while to get those two additional switches figured out.

Next, was to try and get Rhythmbox on it, as it was listed in Sourcery Slackbuild Manager.  But it failed due to dependency's not being met.  I intend to get back to figure out how to build from source, or at least get it on the system in the future.  The reason for wanting Rhythmbox on the system, is so far, Rhythmbox is about the best thing out there that works with DAAP music shares, or at least with the one on my NAS drive.  But since that failed to install out of the box, I went ahead and copied the music from the NAS drive to the unit. That backs up the music, something I had considered anyway.  Also Rhythmbox handles the Shoutcast Streams if one wishes to add a few to it. I usually do.  But, that didn't work out.  So had to stick with the default media player of Exaile.  Even though I don't need Rhythmbox on it now, it's a puzzle that I want to figure out. 

Exaile looked like it would work right, right out of the box, as it says it supports DAAP shares. But it didn't find mine.  It did work with a manual entry, so it's good to go. Also the Radio Streams didn't work. Audacious and VLC both can do those, so it's good. 

So, overall, I'd say that Salix 14.0 with XFCE is a winner.  Much snappier than it's Debian/Ubuntu based Xfce counterparts.  While I didn't get it EXACTLY the way that I wanted, or had expected, it turned out well for my purpose. 

As a standalone OS, for most people, I think that Salix would work well, it has LibreOffice, and handles network drives well. If you want to see a full rundown of it, check this posting out.

Simple Time and Weather Conky Desktop

Systems installed on: Linux Mint 10, Mint 13 MATE, and Peppermint 3.  

Let me start this off saying that I'm not a Conky expert, nor can I provide a ton of help for anyone that runs into problems with this script. I also mention an error that I've getting at the end of the blog post, and would love to know how to get rid of it.

What I was after was a clean and simple Time and Temp display for my Netbook that sits on a nightstand. It's really a glorified Clock radio. And the end results I got and wanted were something like this. 

If haven't you already installed conky, and played around with it you will need to. For those that use the Ubuntu Repositories and PPA's this is how you do it. ConkyForecast and a few other conky tweaks are part of the "Conky Companions" PPA. 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:conky-companions/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install conkyforecast

Or Download ConkyForecast 2.24 for Linux from launchpad yourself.

Built packages

• conkyforecast Weather forecast script with support for language files, for use in Conky
  Package files

• conkyforecast_2.24.dsc (1.1 KiB)
• conkyforecast_2.24.tar.gz (10.8 MiB)
• conkyforecast_2.24_all.deb (3.2 MiB) 

Once you have it installed that should be it for conkyForecast, but should you want to modify it, or need to modify it you can copy it to your home directory from within the terminal with this simple command, and then edit it with your text editor.

cp /usr/share/conkyforecast/conkyForecast.config ~/.conkyForecast.config

I had to edit my .conkyForecast.config file, for fahrenheit instead of celcius temperatures, and I also removed a # mark on line 5 to make the .xml infor available to conkyForecast.


#=============================================#
# EXPERT SETTINGS, NOT REQUIRED TO BE ALTERED #
#=============================================#
BASE_XOAP_URL = http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/<LOCATION>?cc=*&dayf=5&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=<XOAP_PARTNER_ID>&key=<XOAP_LICENCE_KEY>&unit=i
BASE_XOAP_URL = http://xml.weather.com/weather/local/<LOCATION>?cc=*&dayf=10&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=<XOAP_PARTNER_ID>&key=<XOAP_LICENCE_KEY>&unit=i
MAXIMUM_DAYS_FORECAST = 4

#===============================================#
# USER SETTINGS, EDIT BASED ON DOCUMENTED SETUP #
#===============================================#
CACHE_FOLDERPATH = /tmp/
CONNECTION_TIMEOUT = 5
EXPIRY_MINUTES = 30
TIME_FORMAT = %H:%M
DATE_FORMAT = %Y-%m-%d
LOCALE = en
XOAP_PARTNER_ID = 
XOAP_LICENCE_KEY =
DEFAULT_LOCATION = UKXX0103 
AUTO_NIGHT = False
PROXY_HOST = 
PROXY_PORT = 8080
PROXY_USERNAME = 
PROXY_PASSWORD = 

Now that you've got conkyForecast on your system, next all your should have to do is to create or modify your .conkyrc text file. This can be the tricky part.  Below is a copy of my .conkyrc file. OR you can download a copy of it from here. 

# Modified by RandyNose(.com) for simple desktop time and temp #
# Original code swipped from Conky Metro Clock by Satya #
# satya164.deviantart.com #


# Conky settings #
background no
update_interval 1

override_utf8_locale yes

double_buffer yes
no_buffers yes

text_buffer_size 2048

# Window specifications #
own_window yes
own_window_class conky
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorate,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

border_inner_margin 0
border_outer_margin 0

alignment bl
gap_x 100
gap_y 100

# Graphics settings #
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders no

# Text settings #
use_xft yes
xftalpha 0
text_buffer_size 2048

uppercase no

default_color FFFFFF


TEXT
${voffset 10}${font Ubuntu Light:size=40}${goto 550}${execi 600 conkyForecast --location=44107 --datatype=CN --refetch}${voffset -10}
${voffset 10}${font Ubuntu Light:size=50}${goto 550}${execi 1800 conkyForecast --location=44107 --datatype=CT --refetch}${voffset -10}${goto 875}${execi 1800 conkyForecast --location=44107 -u --datatype=HT --refetch}
${voffset 10}${font Ubuntu Light:size=40}${time %A}${font}${voffset -10}
${voffset 10}${font Ubuntu Light:size=40}${time %B} ${time %e}${font}${voffset -10}
${voffset 10}${font Ubuntu Light:size=100}${time %I:%M %p}${font}${voffset -10}


Be sure to save the text file as .conkyrc in your home dir. The location setting that I have is 44107, my US zip code. I am going to guess that any valid US zip code will work.  If that doesn't work for you, try going to your city on weather.com and using the location code in the URL. OR try this posting to sort it out.

Now you should be all set to run conky at the terminal and test it out, and/or add it to your start up applications. 

I should also note, that I AM getting an error on my system when I run in the terminal. How to fix it at this point, I'm not sure. But maybe this posting will ferret out an answer. :) 
The error is this:


WARNING: gnome-keyring:: couldn't connect to: /tmp/keyring-nITDzm/pkcs11: No such file or directory
Conky: desktop window (180012f) is subwindow of root window (13a)
Conky: window type - normal
Conky: drawing to created window (0x2600001)
Conky: drawing to double buffer
ERROR: Server connection error: HTTP Error 503: Service Unavailable

Some of Sites that I visited while creating this post were:https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=139962http://ashu-geek.blogspot.com/2012/03/conkyforecast-224-current-weather.htmlhttp://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869328http://satya164.deviantart.com/   He's also here: http://funsurf-blog.blogspot.com/

Tethering in a Tempest

Unless you've been living in another hemisphere, or not, I think that most everyone has heard about Hurricane Sandy.  If not, then, I'd like to know where you've been. As there were many folks just hammered by the storm, and were without power and or without internet service.  And even a few lost lives and houses. Us in the Cleveland, Ohio area had our share of the storm.

I'm one of the more fortunate, as we had a landlord who lives in the same building, (duplex) that hooked us up to generator power for a few hours each day.  But our internet service was on and off, so I wanted to use my Android Phone, (Thunderbolt HTC) to get online. I really don't like to type more than I have to if I'm using a phone, or a touch screen. Since I was also lucky enough to still have a Verizon Unlimited Data Package, I wanted to flex that option. 

One of my G+ Geek Trucker Buds  mentioned to use FoxFi for my phone, and turn it into a WiFi hotspot. FoxFi is a free App, etc.  So, off I go tap tap tapping away on my phone to around the Google Play app selection. I find it, download it, and Install it, and ZOinK!  No joy. I am informed by FoxFi that HTC has a locked up the WiFi or some such nonsense, but it suggests and supports Bluetooth.  I don't have a Bluetooth connection for my computer, so I opt to search for a more mundane method of USB cable tether.

I browse around on Google Play, and found the Demo Version of KLink.  I install it, expect that I'll have to fire up Windows in order to get the PC side to work, but nope.  Easy to follow links and instructions to DL a .DEB file to my phone that I can then install onto my Linux Mint 9 LTS endowed Acer PC.  

Viola! App is downloaded and installed, DEB file is found on Android via USB cable connection,  I fire up a terminal session, as suggested, type in Klink, and Bingo! We're live on the interwebs with a good and speedy connection too!  As the image below suggests. 

Man, I was so tickled, I bought the app, even though there are some freebie versions that are supposed to work, that I hadn't even tried at the time.  So, I shelled out $4.99 for the app, and get the full version, as I don't feel like mucking around with anything else. 

I was so happy, I had to celebrate with some cookies, milk, and a couple screen shots of my shenanigans. And I'm +1'd by a couple of other geek friends, Mat and Claudio. 

Thanks, Brandt,  Stephen, and others for the suggestions of FoxFi. Looks like a nice tool, but not the right tool for my phone and this job. 

Thanks Christophe Versieux for the suggestion of ClockworkMod Tether, as it might do the trick,  and while it IS free, I still had to DL and install g++ to make and compile it, something of a show stopper when you don't have any connections to do an apt-get install. Also, not something everyone would be willing or know how to tackle.  

Oh! About this "superstorm" word. 

This from PopSi.com 

"Hurricane Sandy wasn't a "superstorm." Not because it wasn't a "super" "storm," but because "superstorm" is an imaginary scare-term that exists exclusively for shock value."

And now, I have to go make sure that I don't break my neck to change the time on a clock that was perfectly fine until some bastards (who are now dead, I'm sure) decided that we need to muck around with our timepieces in order to make them make more sense with the orb that we live on, and the one that gives use light and life.  Yea, I'm against changed the time on our clocks twice a year. It no longer serves a purpose. Go AWAY Daylight savings!!  

Bumping up from Mint 10 to Mint 13 via Mint Backup

I really wanted to document this a little bit more so I could have had a fresher brain dump of what I did for this post.  I did a post back when Mint 9 LTS came out, about the changes and tweaking that I did to it to get it more like the Ubuntu (8?ish) experience that I had come to enjoy.  Much of what I had done had become even more do-able with Ubuntu Tweak as that GAVE back much of what Ubuntu and Canonical and been shunting along the way to simplify the OS. You can't give someone a 5 speed, and expect them to be happy with "3 on the tree" with a newer model just for the sake of "simplicity".

I also like the idea of the LTS release. As I do tend to add this and that to my system. So, for this update I decided to try out the Mint Backup Tool. While Mint backup does do some things simply, it's far from perfect.  It also takes quite a bit of time for 200 gigabytes of data. Would I use it to easily pick and choose dir's that I'd want to back up to another drive? Definitely. Would I use it to back up my software selection? Absolutely.  Getting a copy of your data to another location it worked very well.  Where the problem comes in, or the pain, is when you do your restore.

The APT repositories or PPA's that are on a default system are added automatically. Those that aren't you have to go back and add manually.

Also, since I was moving from a Gnome2 system to MATE, I had some duplication of programs,  such as Gedit, AND Pluma, XScreensaver AND Gnome Screensaver, but that proved interesting, as I have two monitors, and there were two different screen savers going at the same time.

A Good majority of my dir's were given ROOT permissions, so I had to go back and change those later. I'm not sure if it was my fumbling around, by not restoring things in the correct order or not. Meaning, I restored my software selection prior to restoring my file directories. The tutorial did it the other way around.

One of the first things that I added was the Ubuntu Tweak PPA, and Downloaded the Google Chrome browser via Firefox. Yes, I'm not as FOSS sensitive as some of my other Linux Brethren.  I've also moved my music and plan on moving other large directories to another drive and link to them, so when I DO backup things in the future, they're more segmented. So, more or less whatever I've created is on one partition, and more static files, like Music, Videos, etc, would be on another.

Overall, I'd say that the Mint Backup utility did it's job. It DID back things up well. Restoring was much quicker, than backing up. I'd give it 4 out of 5. The ability to use a GUI to pick and choose what to backup or restore is slick. But some directories, such as my ./lastpass dir or any other "Piped" dir wouldn't backup, and hang the process, so you'd have to start over. With 200 GB, it took quite a bit of time. 8 hrs or more. On a system such as my wife's who's \home dir was only 2GB I suspect it would be much quicker, though, on her machine, I just did a clean install.

So tell me, have you used Mint Backup?
If so would you use it again?

I think I might, but not all the time. Sometimes a fresh install is just, well, Minty Fresh. :)



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