Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade breaks printers.

Well, it broke one of mine.

I have the mighty Epson ALCX11NF set up as my network printer. It's a totally awesome small workgroup printer with a capacity of 45000 pages per month. I think I only read that much because I sure as heck don't print that much. It scans, photocopies and faxes too. It's sure a lot of machine for the money.

I still have a little Epson Stylus Photo R210 for when I need to print photographic quality images and one off CD and DVDs, etc. It's working faultlessly after the upgrade.

Getting the printer installed in the first place isn't plug and pray, as Windoze users are accustomed to and Ubuntu users are becoming accustomed to. There is a little tweaking involved because it uses a filter shell script to take output from your application and feed it to the printer. OK - that's an oversimplification, but it will do for the purposes of this article.

First off, here's how to install the printer:
* Go over to http://www.gedda.info/?p=132 and read what has been done before. It's VERY straight forward.
* However, scroll down to Frank's comment on November 6, 2008 and Virgil's comment on November 7. Frank gets it almost right. So does Virgil. The solution of copying the contents of /usr/local/bin to /usr/lib/cups/filters works, but it's not elegant. If you make symbolic links, that would be a far better solution. The choice is up to you.


And here's how to fix the broken install when you upgrade to Jaunty:
* When you try to print, you will get an error and the Printing Troubleshooter will pop up and help you.
* The Printing Troubleshooter tells you that "Missing Printer Driver"... etc... etc... "requires the pstoalcx11.sh program". Bingo!
* First, check that pstoalcx11.sh is in /usr/local/bin and that permissions are set to read and execute for all users and groups. If it's not there, go back to the install procedure above.
* Next, try sudo aa-complain cupsd in case you overwrote the config file during the upgrade. Restart cups (sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart) and try again.
* Drumroll - fanfare - high fives all around - it should be working now.


Come to think of it, this fault is likely to occur on any upgrade where the aa-complain config files are overwritten during an upgrade. Bookmark this page so that you have it to hand when the next Ubuntu distro comes out in only six months.

Undefined video mode at boot.

Here's one choice little problem that remained after a failed partial upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 beta.

After boot, the message "Starting up... Undefined video mode 31f" comes up, with a list of all supported video modes below it. You can press enter and choose the video mode which you would like. In my case, that's 37D.

Here's how to fix it:
Open /boot/grub/menu.lst in your favourite editor (gedit, nano) as su, i.e. sudo gedit...
Search for "vga=". In my case, it was vga=799. I replaced "799" with "893", rebooted and all was well.

In your case, you need to check what the hex number is for the mode you want. Google for a hex to decimal converter and convert that hex code to decimal. 31f = 799, 37d = 893, etc. Change the value at the first "vga=" instance to the value that matches the video mode you want, reboot and all should be well.

Cheers!!

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Upgrade

I did it. You probably did too. Bit the bullet and upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

I've only upgraded my workstation but still have my HTPC and WWW server to go. I'm nervous about those two.

The upgrade is pretty straight forward. Just press "Upgrade" in the software update dialog that raises its head every so often and let the software do its thing. Chances are, if your machine was running in a stable manner before the upgrade, it will be afterwards.

There were two things which bothered me about the upgrade:
1. It removed Google Picasa Beta 3. No big trouble to reinstall it, but as I have more than 100K images on an NFS share the reindex is going to take a long time. The nasty thing about it is that it removed as part of the "Remove Obsolete Packages" component of the upgrade. Watch out for this.

2. The only other headache so far, and this update is only a few hours old now, is that the Tracker Applet keeps reporting "There was an error while performing indexing: Index corrupted". Again, not too bad, as there are a couple of possible fixes for it reported here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tracker/+bug/361560.

The fix I chose was to kill the related processes and delete the indexes, etc and reboot. No problems with the system after that.

The better fix is in the post by Bryan McLellan. Here's how he did it:

"...
Found a workaround/fix that's more user friendly:

sudo apt-get install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r # --hard-reset

Then I logged out and back in so the processes that I had previously killed by hand would restart in a normal fashion.
..."

I came across one more solution that is an extension of the one above. It's a little more elegant and complete in some ways. YMMV, etc. Try this:

sudo apt-get install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r # --hard-reset
/usr/lib/tracker/trackerd &
tracker-applet &
disown -a

I'll be back with more posts on what went right, what went wrong and some other info about this upgrade soon.

Cheers!!