Installing HP p1505n on Ubuntu 8.10

... Well it really wasn't a problem after all. Here's what I did:

1. You'll need to install build-essentials first, to be able to compile in Ubuntu. Likewise, now would be a good time to install HPLIP if you haven't already done so:

   sudo apt-get install build-essential hplip

2. Followed the instructions over at foo2xqx.rkkda.com. But to mirror their instructions:

   wget http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
   tar zxvf foo2zjs.tar.gz
   cd foo2zjs
   make
   ./getweb P1505
   sudo make install
   sudo make install-hotplug
   sudo make cups

3. Ran system-config-printer in my xterm, in the GUI that would be at System->Administrator->Printing. Clicked on New.
4. Selected AppSocket/HP JetDirect, and entered my printer's IP address.
5. HP was pre-selected, I just hit Forward.
6. Scrolled down to "LaserJet P1505" (not P1505n!) and selected the recommended driver.
7. Gave the printer a name.
8. Tada! Now I can see my new laserprinter in the list of printers.

Silly HP p1505n

We bought an HP p1505n LaserPrinter just prior to Christmas, and for one reason or the other I never got around to installing it.

The thing is, I really hate printers.

I always have. Somehow I find myself always distrusting machines with moving parts. Like those cellphones which are like in two parts which are cunningly attached, where you can rotate one section to get to the key pad. Like Automobiles- they normally break down when you need them most. Or, like in this case- printers.

Anyway, enough digressing. Last year I got a Color printer, and the HPLIP printer install app actually worked (!!). After that I was like... "Maybe, with the right tools, printing is not a problem anymore on Linux."

Not that printing has always been a problem- Back when I ran Gentoo Linux I normally used lprng, which, despite their horrible webpage delivers very easy-to-use and stable code. Managing printers with lprng was actually quite easy.

Enter CUPS (Common Unix Printing System). I get the reason why it was considered necessary- lprng and its relatives tend to be a little.. technical. Unix needed a simple automagic manager of printers. A couple of years ago I decided to swap Linux dists to Ubuntu, and I discovered that it was not only more complicated, but it was complicated on several layers of abstraction. It took quite a lot of hours to get things working, and subsequently I would dread the day something goes wrong, because then I would have to troubleshoot my CUPS.

Anyway. Like I said earlier, my previous install being a success and all, I'm like "This won't be so bad..." and I started HPLIP. I told HPLIP I had a new printer in my network, and yep, it discovered it and its model. It then said that it needed to download a driver for this printer, is it ok to download it - to which I said yes. Then after asking me to fill in some details (name, etc), it proudly told me that it was ready, and if I wanted to print a test page.

I answered 'yes'. After two to three minutes of waiting, I get a printout with the words:

**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.

Great. It felt like all the angst of CUPS revisited me. I really didn't want to troubleshoot this. So I didn't.

This was all last week. Now I'm going to try to get the damn thing to work. Wish me luck.

Paprika (2006)

I really had no idea what we were going to watch when we inserted the movie Paprika into our player. For some reason I sort of expected an Eastern European detective story or something. Man was I in for a surprise :)

If I was a little sleepy when we sat down to watch the movie, that tiredness was jolted out of me with the opening scene- This was a really, really well animated Anime!

About a near future where it is possible to enter another person's dreams, it quickly gets freaky. Quite disturbing. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick's books- psychadelic and deep on one end and at the same time rather easy to digest.

The music score, by 平沢 進 (Hirasawa Susumu) is totally awesome. Today, in the light of day, I listened to the soundtrack of the movie, and the Japanese electro-pop (which I normally do not like) really got to me- hypnotic, in some ways.

Finally, I did some searching on the google and Imdb, and discovered that the director- 今 敏 (Kon Satoshi) - did some of my other favourites. He directed Tokyo Godfathers which we saw some months ago (About some homeless in Tokyo who discover a baby in a dumpster), and the first mini-movie in Memories, called 彼女の想いで (Kanojo no Omoide), called "Magnetic Rose" for some reason in the English translation. He also directed Perfect Blue which deals with another variant of insanity.

Anyway, Paprika was well worth watching. I normally don't suggest dubbing, but the story paces up at times and it's probably difficult to read (and digest) the subtitles. If you don't understand Japanese I won't get mad at you if you choose the dubbed version. I promise.

bye-bye Muttng! Hello again Mutt!

For the last couply of years I've been an enthusiastic user of mutt-ng. Prior to using mutt-ng, I used mutt- but was really irritated over some things:

• Changing IMAP directories took forever- it had to re-read all headers in that directory, which takes... time.
• I found it a little irritating that I couldnt see a list of imap folders on the left, like in most GUI mail user agents (MUAs).

Enter mutt-ng. Mutt-ng took lots of mutt patches which for some reason hadn't found its way into mutt. Other than that it was the same old app. My two issues with mutt (see above) were dealt with. Yay!

Problem was, that since 2006 there hasn't really been any development in the project, and it made me wonder if mutt-ng had been perfected (ahem. No program is ever perfected right?), or if no-one used it anymore. If noone uses it... well, what DO they use then? Have they gone back to mutt, or have they jumped ship to other MUAs?

The other day I decided to make a clean upgrade on my home computer to Ubuntu 8.10, and for some reason or the other forgot to re-compile mutt-ng (I checked mail by ssh-ing to one of my other machines). A few days ago I was idling thru the zillions of packages in apt, and found... mutt-patched.

For all I can see there is no real difference between mutt-ng and mutt-patched in that both support the sidebar as well as header caching. The main difference lies in that mutt-patched is supported enough to actually have made it into apt.

Its nice to be back using mutt.