Shonky non-standard installer, but it seems to work

Grabbed an Epson CX5500 the other day, as it was on special for about 6x the price of lunch, & it prints & scans & copies.

Next, I had a go at bunging it onto my Mandriva 2008.0-running laptop.

None of the installation packages (named pips) matched the distro version, so I grabbed a .src.rpm to rebuild a matched one. This requested a gazillion or so -devel packages, but did compile... then didn’t produce all of the required RPMs, specifically missing the one which contains the proprietary extensions, I soon discover.

Grumble.

So I plugged it in (is USB). The software manager for it (HAL daemon via D-Bus) chose a driver which looks almost right (one model number away), but which doesn’t quite work: it prints about 6cm of output, gets most of the colours wrong, then powers down(!) the printer & stops (discards the rest of the binary for the printer).

Grumble, grumble.

So I grabbed the “installation” package, to discover that it’s a tar-gzipp’ed shell script, which seems to install the components I apparently need, including the extensions.

It also did some microsurgery to the CUPSd config file, to add a new definition (which is named a few model numbers off). It also did another specific, important thing: it actually works! (-:

The next adventure is to experiment with the scanner drivers (named iscan) which package has file-conflicts with a couple of existing components of SANE. What I’ll probably do is fetch some real source (if any) & integrate the changes with SANE as a patch/update, since there don’t appear to be any wonky proprietary parts to it.

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

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every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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