Linux drivers for a Dell 1235CN printer - kudos to Samsung

I purchased a Dell 1235CN laser multi-function printer, which arrived today. Unfortunately Fedora 12 doesn't know about the printer, so this lead me to the inevitable search for the right drivers.

I found a post by someone who had the same problem. She/he had called Dell support who told her/him that Dell did not support Linux for that printer, but that the printer is actually a rebadged Samsung CLX-3175 printer.

I visited the Samsung web site and was really happy to see that Samsung to a great job of supporting their printers on Windows, Mac and Linux. I was able to download a Linux tarball that contained the necessary drivers wrapped up in an easy to use installer.

http://www.samsung.com/au/consumer/print-solutions/print-multifunctions-copiers/colour-multifunction/CLX-3175FN/XSA/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&tab=support

After installing the tarball my printer was working.

Thanks to the people at Samsung! Excellent work for your top class Linux support.

VMWare MKS Console Plugin - problem and solution

While messing around with a beta service from Melbourne IT called vCloud Express, that is based on VMWare, I was frustrated that I could not get the VMWare MKS console plugin to work in Firefox on Fedora 12.

I tracked down a forum post that showed me how to run it from the command line:

~/.mozilla/firefox/.default/extensions/VMwareMKSPlugin\@vmware.com/plugins/viewer

This was very useful because I showed that I was missing a number of old shared libraries on which the VMWare console plugin relies: libexpat.so.0 and libstdc++.so.5.

It was then a simple matter of installing the two RPMS: compat-expat1 and compat-libstdc++-33.

Problems with NetworkManager and DHCP

I have great troubles with NetworkManager not being able to acquire an IP address via DHCP on my home network. By accident I killed it and it restarted and immediately acquired the address. It seems that this might be some sort of startup ordering problem.

The simple solution for now is to kill and restart NetworkManager and all is well.

How to enable MP3 playback with Amarok on Fedora 12

Set-up RPM Fusion repository to get the free and non-free components.

http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

Install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/MP3_on_Fedora_Core

Kubuntu rides again

After installing Fedora 12 and having another round of sound problems after I thought I had it all working with Fedora 10 and 11 I thought I would try Kubuntu because previously everything just works with Kubuntu.

Well, much to my surprise, Kubuntu also has sound problems. So there was nothing else to do but start digging. After a bit of experimentation I was able to work out that I needed to make PulseAudio the default and tell Pulse to set-up an ALSA compatibility module.

To make Pulse the default create ~/.asoundrc with the following content.

pcm.!default { type pulse }

ctl.!default { type pulse }

Then set-up the correct modules for the pulseaudio daemon in the file /etc/pulse/default.pa

### Load audio drivers statically (it's probably better to not load

### these drivers manually, but instead use module-hal-detect --

### see below -- for doing this automatically)

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0

load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0

load-module module-alsa-card device_id=0

#load-module module-oss device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input

#load-module module-oss-mmap device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input

#load-module module-null-sink

load-module module-pipe-sink

Dyndns client ddclient config

Update to my earlier post about using ddclient to support dyndns access.
I generated the config file using the dyndns.org web site https://www.dyndns.com/support/tools/clientconfig.html. The config generated by the web site works nicely.

Audio on Fedora finally working

After numerous attempts and many wrong turns I finally have audio working on Fedora 10 at work and Fedora 11 here at home.

I use the KDE version and could never get the microphone to record clear audio. I could also never hear audio from any flash movies played within the browser.

Well the key to the puzzle was that I was fiddling with KMix, the KDE audio mixer. This had very little effect. I recently discovered the Pulse Audio Volume Control application and this has solved my problem. By manipulating the audio settings via the Pulse Audio Volume Control I now have perfectly working audio.

/usr/bin/pavucontrol in the pavucontrol RPM.