Printing from a fresh install of Kubuntu Dapper failed on an install that I did, and I’ve already replaced Kubuntu with openSuse on my laptop, and I’ll probably use Mepis for terminal server applications or desktops. Issuing a distribution with something like printing broken (and by ‘broken’ I mean anything that smells like an open-ended, hours long troubleshooting situation, even if that is somehow by design) is unacceptable.

Just to memorialize them, here are two helpful posts from LinuxQuestions.org:

See the tail end of this post here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi…d.php?t=331050

I spent literally months f*-king around with Ubuntu trying to get it to print. The post referenced above details my sorry saga. Finally gave up and moved on to other distros. Found Mepis to work flawlessly. Did an A-B comparison, found numerous differences in config settings but identical processes, daemons, versions of executables, etc. Conclusion: Its all in the config settings. So in theory if these config settings work on Mepis, they should work on Ubuntu. BINGO BABY !!!

My bottom line advice for Ubuntu users is: If you want out of the box printing, you are hunting up the wrong distro. Try Mepis instead. If you insist on using Ubuntu - Kubuntu - Xubuntu, save yourself some torture and just pull actually useful config files off Mepis.

Warning: There is a risk that a s/w upgrade could toast your config files. I recommend archiving a copy of the Mepis /etc/cups folder and treating it as a data file to keep backed up. In the event printing mysteriously breaks, try reapplying the Mepis config files and see if printing is restored.

good luck.

And the second post:

Dapper printer problems
There seems to some real problems with printer setup in Dapper and a number of solutions that work for some but not others. I’ll just detail what it finally took to install my HP Deskjet as a local USB printer.
Code:

sudo foomatic-cleanupdrivers sudo adduser cupsys shadow sudo dpkg-reconfigure cupsys

Select the proper printer interface. For the rest, the defaults worked for me.
You should be part of the lpadmin group — if not, add yourself.
(The printer should be turned on of course.)
At this point the KDE tools still can’t find more than four HP printer drivers, so open a browser window at http://localhost:631/. The password problem should now be fixed.

Click on Administration and the printer should be listed.
Click to add the correct printer.
Click Set As Default.

I’d still like to know how to get the KDE tools to see all the printer drivers if anyone has a solution.

This post describes how to make Firestarter’s gui load at startup:

Launching Firestarter minimized to the tray on login

Having performed the above configuration of permissions, the system can further be set up to load Firestarter when you log in with your regular user account. Firestarter will in that case load directly into the system tray without user intervention, after which the main interface can be accessed by clicking the tray icon.

Using GNOME:
The GNOME sessions manager

Open up your GNOME menu, select Preferences followed by Sessions. Switch to the Startup programs tab, pictured right.

Click Add and enter
sudo firestarter –start-hidden
as the startup command. Click OK and you’re done.

To stop Firestarter from loading on login, simply remove its entry from the startup programs listing.

Using KDE:

Open a terminal and execute the following two commands:

echo -e ‘#’!'/bin/shnsudo firestarter –start-hidden’ > ~/.kde/Autostart/firestarter
chmod a+x ~/.kde/Autostart/firestarter

Firstarter will now load automatically when KDE starts. To stop Firestarter from loading when you log in, remove the ~/.kde/Autostart/firestarter file.

Jens Benecke discusses the relative of merits of KDE and OS X.

For example, he has experienced the same frustration I have witnessed with iPhoto’s (an OS X application) way of organizing things:

Also, I think Apple overdid integration at some point. Consider iTunes and iPhoto. I don’t like the fact that they basically reinvent the file manager. This forces you to learn a different interface to manage your files. It also kills the possibility to organize your files the way you want it. For example, I play in a band. I have a folder “Band” in my home folder. This folder contains “Originals”, “Gigs”, “Repertoire”, “New” and so on. “Originals” contains MP3s of the songs we play. Repertoire and New contain one dir for each song, and in this directory, there are scores (PDF, Garageband, Lilypond, etc), lyrics, further MP3s, recordings, pictures and so on. In the “Gigs” folder there are pictures and video/audio recordings of performances, demo tapes of performances etc.

So, basically I have organized my files according to purpose, not file type. The seperation of iTunes / iPhoto / iMovie etc. forces me to seperate my files according to file type. I could theoretically reorganize everything (about 2000 files), then create “intelligent folders” for each and everything in every application (why are these folders not shared?) and then tag the files so they get sorted into the right folders. Problem with that is: the tagging mechanism is not standardized. I can apply any number of free-form tags to photos. I can’t do that with MP3s and PDFs, for example. Plus, these tags would probably get lost when synchronizing with our band’s FTP server directory, which is shared by a dozen people. Directory information doesn’t.

Another helpful post on installing nxserver (which I must say has consistently been nightmarish):

FreeNX on Ubuntu Breezy Badger
Submitted by msabramo on Sun, 2006-02-19 19:07.

is a snap.

Just check out the FreeNX page on the Ubuntu Wiki

What I did…

$ sudo cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://free.linux.hp.com/~brett/seveas/freenx/ breezy-seveas freenx
$ gpg –keyserver subkeys.pgp.net –recv-keys 1135D466
$ gpg –export –armor 1135D466 | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install freenx nxviewer
$ dpkg –list | grep nx
ii freenx 0.4.4+0.4.5-3ubuntu0 The FreeNX application/thin-client server ba
ii nxagent 1.4.92+1.5.0-4ubuntu0 NoMachine NX - nesting X server with roundtr
ii nxclient 1.5.0-135 NoMachine NX Client and Libraries.
ii nxlibs 1.4.92+1.5.0-4ubuntu0 NoMachine NX - common agent libraries
ii nxviewer 1.4.92+1.5.0-4ubuntu0 NoMachine NX - nesting X server with roundtr

For tons more info on FreeNX, I recommend looking at Kurt Pfeifle’s excellent series in Linux Journal.

I just did the install on Kubuntu Breezy 5.10 and it worked beautifully. Much thanks to all involved in putting the package together.

I’m following these excellent instructions in my attempt to get a Postfix email server going on a Kubuntu 5.10 box.

So far so good, except: upon telnet to port 25, appears to hang at an authentication step. Postfix-tls wasn’t available via the default repositories (search in Adept failed), so I turn to the web. This ubuntu forum post looks helpful, and it has a link to SMTP Authentication with Postfix using files or MySQL.

Ok, search for postfix-tls turned up Package: postfix-tls (2.1.5-9) — but is there an apt package out there? Hmmm…

ISP-Server Setup - Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger” looks like a very useful resource. Wow, quite a thorough page, in that it guides one from OS installation throuhgh all services, including ssh, quota, bind9, etc. Impressive, nice resource. So this page instructs me to see if MySQL is running using netstat -tap. It says this: “tcp 0 0 localhost.localdo:mysql localhost.localdo:40788 TIME_WAIT - ” What does that mean? It looks like an outside connection, given that mysqls should be LISTEN on port 2449. But I should probably go back and be sure that postfix-tls is installed, and that any needed key pairs have been generated and are accessible. There’s some indication from the above pages that Postfix’s chroot’d nature might confuse mysql — er, or something like that. Ah, troubleshooting, so much fun.

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql status does show that mysql is running, but why doesn’t it show up as a listening daemon?

Server version 4.1.12-Debian_1ubuntu3-log
Protocol version 10
Connection Localhost via UNIX socket
UNIX socket /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Uptime: 7 hours 17 min 39 sec

Threads: 1 Questions: 43 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 29 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 18 Queries per second avg: 0.002
nnn@nnn:~$

Oh, wait, blimey! postfix-tls *is* installed:

nnn@nnn:~$ sudo apt-get install postfix-tls
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Note, selecting postfix instead of postfix-tls
postfix is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
nnn@nnn:~$

Ok, so that’s not it. Off to try to find the appropriate Postfix or MySQL log.

A telnet from the inside connects with Postfix, but from the outside just hangs, with no response. But local machine’s firewall is setup and forwarding port 25 correctly, and perimeter firewall is also. What gives?

[Update, 2 December 2005]
On a Kubuntu Breezy 5.10 box, when attempting to launch nxclient (/usr/ ), I received this error message: “nxclient unable to create the x authorization cookie.” I found the fix here. This entry in that thread contains the fix (italicized, emphasis mine):

spikkle
10-02-2005, 10:09 AM
I was able to make it work by taking the following steps:

Install all FreeNX packages from here from the deb packages you are allowed to download:
http://blackbird.kaarsemaker.net/

Install the nxclient deb package from:
http://www.nomachine.com/download_client_linux.php

If you get a message to the effect of “Unable to create X authority” or something like that, then for me the problem was that it was looking in an (outdated) incorrect location for the ‘xauth’ program. Run these commands:

cd /usr/X11R6/bin
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/xauth

This will make a link to the xauth program in the location it expects it to be in. At this point the client worked fine for me.

Good luck.

Just prior to that, I encountered an error which prevented the nxclient from loading at all. I ran the client from the command line so that I could see error messages, and this appeared: “nxclient: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.” I found the fix here.

The relevant post read:

The file you are looking for is in this package libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

Get it from universe.

So, in a shell, I typed: sudo apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

One last note (sorry to do this in reverse order, but I just wanted to get this down where I’d be able to find it later): I needed to copy a key for the nxclient to use from the server to the client box. Freenx / nxserver use ssh to connect, and ssh requires an encrypted key pair, one for each box that participates in the session. When setting up the nxclient, you need to go to [the appropriate directory on the server] and copy the key over to your client’s /usr/NX/share directory (location may differ depending on which distribution you’re using).

One last, last note: I set up nxserver using Rick Stout’s excellent nxserver fedora setup instructions.

Another (really! the last!) note: in the last sentence of this post is a link about where the keys are located. Also, my update repeats what I had said earlier, in part — I was setting up another Kubuntu Breezy box, and had apparently run into this problem before, and forgotten.

[End update]

This post contained a fix for the “nxclient cannot open shared object” error that I received when trying to open in Kubuntu Breezy/5.10.

The relevant post reads:

Re: HOWTO: Can I use FreeNX with Ubuntu? - 4 Weeks Ago
In my original question I asked:

Quote:
Originally Posted by tlepes
Anyone here got nxclient working on Breezy? I used Seveas’s guide on the WIKI https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreeNX but get this error when runnin nxclient on the client machine:

Code:

/usr/NX/bin/nxclient: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Searching Synaptic I only find up to C/C++ 6.0 (methinks). Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to try compiling nxclient from source?

I got a fast response from “bob2″ in the #ubuntu channel on freenode IRC. He pointed me to a web page with search results for the missing library file “libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3″ that showed what packages it was. Issuing the following command solved my problems getting nxclient to run:

Code:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++2.10-dbg libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

On further reflection, I suppose I could have gotten the missing library file by just installing one or the other, as opposed to installing both libstdc++2.10-dbg and libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 packages.

That package search was very cool. I poked around a bit on the website and figured that bob2 must have used the “Search the contents of packages” section of this page: http://packages.ubuntu.com/#search_contents

I also made this comment earlier, which I still believe may be a source of trouble for people later on:

Quote:
Originally Posted by tlepes
I noticed that in synaptic the nxclient does not show anything listed for “dependencies”. Maybe this is a problem with the deb in Seveas’ repository?

Now lets see if we can get this mutha humming…

Other resources that might help (right now I’m getting an authentication error):
ltsp freenx wiki setup page

lug.mtu freenx wiki page

post on nx’s authentication keys and the directories to get from on server and to put in on client. The relevant excerpt:

> >> You will need to tell your NX windows client to use they private key
> >> that FreeNX created during installation. FreeNX creates a
> >> private/public key pair, and stores the private key into
> >> /var/lib/nxserver/nxhome/.ssh/client.id_dsa.key, and the public key
> >> into /var/lib/nxhome/.ssh/authorized_keys2.
> >>
> >> You’ll have to install the private key stored in
> >> /var/lib/nxserver/nxhome/.ssh/client.id_dsa.key into your Windows NX
> >> client. Don’t have a clue on how to do this, but for the Linux NX
> >> client is as simple as copying that file into
> >> /usr/NX/share/client.id_dsa.key.

Note that on my FC4 server the key directory was named:
/var/lib/nxserver/home/.ssh

Desination directory on host (Kubuntu/Breezy 5.10) was named:
/usr/NX/share

Another pretty good page for troubleshooting nx ssh authentication problems

Luna (Microsoft XP) style in KDE

Just a little experiment in making a Linux/KDE desktop look as much as possible like the Microsoftian universe. Iused a KDE theme that I pulled from the web somewhere — probably from a KDE theme repository.