Comic con Prep

This is trying out making some robot arms for a a costume to wear at the local Comic-Con.

Unfortunately I only have a week to get it done as the idea wasn't agreed on until late and I didn't get the phone ordered and delivered until 10 days ahead of the event.

The gloves are turning out OK, hopfully the test of our turns out at least as good, hopfully better.

I've made helmets before, but never anything like this and even though I'm following a pattern, I'm not really sure how it will get attached.

Prior work was with cheap floor mats, this time it's with quality 6 mm craft foam in large sheets for the robot arms, and thin craft foam to cover the gloves.

So I missed updating for all of 2017, but it wasnt a total loss.. I upgraded my Ubuntu workstation to the latest 17.10 and it didnt break everything this time. I am now at a point that I want to upgrade hardware, as there are programs that would take advantage of the new video, memory, disk, and cpu advancements.  But at least the core system didnt get destroyed by an update.

Progress.

Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10 broken USB sound

So I first discover that my headset sound (which frankly I rarely use) was not functioning after I had upgraded to 16.04

and theres where I fell into the rabbit hole and began my chase.

Since I was on the latest LTS version I figured it was time to update again. And from all first views the upgrade worked fine. Applications were still there s I expected. The ones I hadnt used in ages had lost some things, but since they were seldom used it was no loss.

Thing is, this machine is really for a very few select items, mostly browser activities and games, and thats where I fell...

It started out odd too, I was listening to a Youtube video and everything was fine as far as I could tell. Then I went to launch GuildWars2 which was working perfectly before the upgrade. And that seemed to go ok too, and was starting its round up patch upgrades like it always does.

Go back to reading this and that, and finally notice GW2 is up to the point of allowing me to launch. Launch it and decide to listen to the game for a change. nothing... Hmm, open the shell I use to launch the game from, notice errors about pulsaudio.  Which then sends me down the path of finding out that thats not supported, and we are stupid to think anything should work with it and why arent we using Alsasound instead you heretics.

Hmm, ok maybe 16.04 had some update issues and I need to clean it up. No such luck, and after wiping my system and fresh install there is still no sound.

OK, lets try 16.10 then, go latest greatest.  Looks ok, though still no sound. Check the sound dialog and run a test. I hear "Left Speaker" then nothing.. Not only nothing, mouse and keyboard (both USB as well) go unresponsive. Great.. hard reboot.

Try again. crash. Several more ties I find maybe I'm missing a Logitech Solaar unifying application.. Ok, get that.. nice app lets me see my mouse battery status.. Still no sound, still locks up.

Short of it is, my USB headset is now sitting unplugged and I will likely get a gamer headset instead. 

Everytime I would try to listen to sound, and bump the mouse or type on the keyboard the USB devices would all go comatose. Sad that it worked on previous Ubuntu versions, broke exceptionally on this version (both 16.04 and 16.10) and now all forum posts I can find on it talk of disconnecting the pulseaudio. Nice. Especially since when you do that, you lose the volume control on the task bar.

Maybe I will try again with next version update, or if/when I get a new computer.

Ubuntu 16.10 sound struggles

Getting my sound working is now on the agenda after getting the primary game I like (Guild Wars 2) to install and load.

Now all attempts to play sound through my headset fails with what appears to be a USB lockup. Specifically these seem to roll around the fwupd process and this bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fwupd/+bug/1574079

Since I have a USB - Mouse, keyboard, headset, and wireless NIC this could be a problem for me if the system cant keep it straight which device is supposed to do what function.  Apparently it could try to send mouse commands to the sound device or sound outputs to the mouse device. Umm yeah...

But I dont want to go the route of some of the references, in saying that my hardware is too old. Once I start that I will need to replace everything as its all fairly old as far as computer hardware goes. Maybe that is the final real answer, but hopefully not today.

I found these kinds of references on boards concerning that bug that spoke of the Logitech Unifying driver and how to get this installed, and registered properly by unplugging and replugging each device.  Now I have a tray icon showing me the power left on the mouse. Unsure what it does for the keyboard

Installed per this
http://pwr.github.io/Solaar/installation.html
and this
https://launchpad.net/~daniel.pavel/+archive/ubuntu/solaar

Using these command sequences

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:daniel.pavel/solaar
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install solaar

Now I'm working my way through the other known bits needed by wine and Playonlinux I had already found , such as needing libpng.so installed and ensuring the wine:386 components are installed. 

libpng

sudo apt-get install libpng-dev

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

http://askubuntu.com/questions/508934/how-to-install-libpng-and-zlib

Now I'm back to setting up the rest of the components

Playonlinux

1. Add the repository by using the following in the terminal,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/apps

2. Then update your package list,

sudo apt-get update

3. And then installation,

sudo apt-get install playonlinux

And Wine

1. Add the PPA via command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

2. Update package cache and install wine1.9:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install wine1.9 winetricks

Install latest Wine Dev release from the Official WineHQ PPA:

Open terminal from Unity Dash, App Launcher, or via Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut key. When it opens, paste below commands and run one by one.

1. For 64-bit system, rum command to enable 32 bit architecture:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

2. Add the wine PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds

3. Once you have the PPA added in your system, run below commands one by one to refresh package caches and install Wine 1.8:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel

The installation automatically replaces old wine releases installed on your system.

4. Finally you may run below command to initialize your wine configuration.

winecfg

Inside the winecfg is the critical to GuildWars2 of going into the wine configuration and setting to emulate windows desktop.


And now finding the Ubuntu Software Center wont load

Software Center

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PackageManagerTroubleshootingProcedure

Step 10 Ubuntu Software Center fails to open

If the Ubuntu Software Center fails to open, then please execute these Terminal commands: 

sudo rm /usr/lib/python*/dist-packages/__pycache__/*pyc

sudo apt-get install --reinstall python3-gi

sudo apt-get purge software-center

rm -rf ~/.cache/software-center

rm -rf ~/.config/software-center

rm -rf ~/.cache/update-manager-core

sudo rm /var/lib/apt-xapian-index/cataloged_times.p

sudo rm /var/lib/apt-xapian-index/values

sudo update-apt-xapian-index --verbose --force

sudo update-apt-xapian-index --force

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo apt-get install software-center ubuntu-desktop

sudo dpkg-reconfigure software-center --force

sudo update-software-center

sudo apt-get install --reinstall software-center

Then reboot and retest. 

Impromptu Upgrade to 16.10

So like years past, I'm not on a faster track Ubuntu version even though everything was working fine on the LTS version 16.04

Fine, except for the one thing I rarely use, and I now kick myself for obsessing over. In Guild Wars 2 I wasnt hearing the sound. Started digging, since I originally loaded it up using Wine directly, then switched over to Playonlinux as that was much easier to handle and load the game. Up until a recent update the sound was fine. I didnt do anything to the native Ubuntu pulsaudio as I really dont care what the mechanism is as long as it works.

Well, now it wasnt working and I began digging, and finding several "you should have known this" kinds of posts in the Playonlinux forums that said they dont support pulsaduio and the tone seemed to be that if you did use it you were a dredge not worth their time. Go setup Alsasound and be done!

Fine if it hadnt been working just a few short hours ago.  So I kept digging. Tried to halt pulsadio, uninstall pulsaudio. Neither worked. Then I tried to uninstall wine just in case the wine 1.9 was conflicting with the ver 4.? of Playonlinux. Nope, no sound.

So, now its maybe something just needs to be cleared out, the game had been through upgrades as far back as Ubuntu 12.  So I clean out all remnants of wine, uninstall playonlinux, go dig out the latest GWinstaller app and start over fresh.

Big time fail now as the installer wont work and I get a log similar to the following.

fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0xffffffff (nil)
fixme:advapi:RegisterTraceGuidsW (0x495320, 0x24ef248, {3dada31d-19ef-4dc1-b345-037927193422}, 1, 0x24a4f04, (null), (null), 0x24ef260): stub
fixme:gdi:GdiInitializeLanguagePack stub
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)

But all the references there talk about mixed 64bit and 32bit wine issues. Clear everythgin again and try pure 64bit, and then pure 32bit....

Fail again.

Finally upgraded to 16.10 thinking maybe there was a change in there that might help/

Fail again.

Decided to really clean out everything (since my home directory is on its own partition) and full erase the root and install fresh fresh everything from OS up to the wine and Playonlinux version and all its subordinate needs.

Still fail, and am seriously thinking its time to update system and get Win10 for games instead.

Then I stumble upon one line in an old forum post that said essentially
"I must go into Configure Wine --> Graphics and then check Emulate a Virtual Desktop. And it runs just as if it was on Windows for me!"

What do you know? that worked! I'm now in prcess of the long network layer download of the GW game finally.  yay!

So like I had back on 13.10 I am now at the point of success.
"At present I am able to run Guild Wars 2, Secondlife, Gpodder, Chrome, Wally, and Blender without any additional tweaking. The last round through this update maze had me losing sound and video from the GW2 install until I went and pulled a beta release of Wine. Almost fearful I was going to have to dig out the compiler and do some make make-install steps, but I didnt have to the beta repo set itself up nicely. But, this time I didn't have to go there. It just ran. Sound was active without glitchy stuttering and everything.

Sound, in Secondlife is always a challenge. This time I thought it was that way again. Since its my main reason for running the application if the sound doesnt work then there isn't much else. But, that worked well too. Seems like something wrong when it all just "works".

 Except this time around I didnt bother with Secondlife, Gpodder, or Wally (yet). Guild Wars 2 and Chrome are fine so far. 

Notepad++ and a "grep" like feature

I was needing to pull a bunch of lines out of a huge file. Over 200,000 records long, and I didnt want to resort to pushing it over to one of my linux servers just to grep the lines out, and then pull them back in to use the output selectively.

So, I found out this neat little sequence using the latest version of Notepad++

1. Open the document
2. hit Ctrl-F 
3. In this find window, go to the "Mark" tab

4. make sure the "Bookmark" is checked
5. place what you are looking for in the "Find what" field
6. Mark all
7. Now close this and go up to the search menu
8. Do a search  "Bookmark"
   
9. in here are options to strip out all bookmarks or copy all bookmarks
   

For my use case I needed to copy all the bookmarks and paste them into a fresh document.

Year in Pictures 2014

Halloween 2014

Yes, this was an old photo, but I would have worn this for halloween this year if I had thought of it soon enough.

2013 in auto awesome

Google+

So, I've been spending alot more time there than anywhere else. Stumbled on this, and wanting to see if it works here.

Embedded Google+

Very cool, and opens up a whole new dimension to posting or retaining information.

Ubuntu 13.10

So I finally updated, (again), my home system. this time around none of my games broke to the point of despair. My installer was even interrupted by a connection issue part way through and it still was able to succeed without my needing to go get a DVD installer. I did wait at least a month prior to attempting the update, just in case there were critical patches needed, or the main servers were flooded with everyone else trying to install. But, I'm current again.

At present I am able to run Guild Wars 2, Secondlife, Gpodder, Chrome, Wally, and Blender without any additional tweaking. The last round through this update maze had me losing sound and video from the GW2 install until I went and pulled a beta release of Wine. Almost fearful I was going to have to dig out the compiler and do some make make-install steps, but I didnt have to the beta repo set itself up nicely. But, this time I didn't have to go there. It just ran. Sound was active without glitchy stuttering and everything.

Sound, in Secondlife is always a challenge. This time I thought it was that way again. Since its my main reason for running the application if the sound doesnt work then there isn't much else. But, that worked well too. Seems like something wrong when it all just "works".

The biggest failure was on the part of my local network, I think I over loaded the wireless links with all the downloads, and it gave up. This could have been disaster, but I must have had most of the install already there as the only portion that really had to redownload was the wine installer.

Gpodder did lose its mind. Every one of my podcast URL links was gone. So I had to go through my download directory and decide if the show I had previously downloaded worth going and looking up again. Bit of a forced purge, but considering that I havnt had the long drive to work lately I really wasn't missing out on most shows. Getting a clean slate there is actually a help.

Chrome has been a problem child in the past, mostly due to the 64-bit Ubuntu I think, as the links to the updates aren't always ready for prime time with the Chrome builds on 64-bit. This time around, either there wasn't a corresponding update with 13.10 or it just worked as well. All my tabs were still there, all my main logins were still functional after the update.

Wally and Blender both worked, with Wally dutifully grabbing up random wallpapers for me again, and Blender with its new UI continues to befuddle me. I suppose if I actually took the time to step through the tutorials again I'd get back up to speed quickly. But, when I go and try to run my test blend through and it comes out black and white instead of looking like glass. I'm a bit stumped. Apparently they pulled a lot of the ray tracing algorithms back into the package, and the external rendering engines I had once, are no longer available. So even there I need to re-learn. Maybe when I make some free time to look there again it will all make sense.

Evolution Email and AT&T

I'll be quick on this one, since I don't have all the pertinent version information in front of me right now.

Synopsis of the problem is that my Evolution email reader quit downloading new content after an update of my Ubuntu workstation.  Shows how much I notice things, in that I had not gotten any email inbound for about 10 days.  Then I look and see I'm getting a communication error from the POP server.

Searching for this error resulted in either "nothing" or posts over three years old (which are typically worse than nothing).

Final fix was a simple change from "SSL Authentication", to just "Login" on my Evolution account configuration.

Many things to do

Crazy time of year. Tried doing nanowrimo last month, on top of all the family activities.  Needless to say I didn't make my word goal.  I barely made 4% of the word goal. Oh well, try again next year, and maybe in the interim I can punch up this one I started.

Work is busy busy with more projects and facilities to integrate than I had expected for end of the year. that's good, but leaves little time for other things.

My home system keeps prompting me every few days to upgrade to newest Ubuntu. I don't think I want to. I finally have everything working, camera functions, all the websites I go to work, the windows games like Rift, GuildWars, Lord of the Rings, Eve, etc. they all work quite well under wine. That and the fact I really don't like the look of the Unity desktop is making me re-evaluate my choice in system.

I am now planning to use part of my holiday break time to check out the various distributions and see what one fits for me the best. Anecdotally Mint is leading the way right now, since they are the best of the multimedia options essentially on an Ubuntu platform. But, the newer release of OpenSuSE is very intriguing.

Maybe its time for me to go back to an RPM based system and learn its foibles.  But, its so so hard to go away from something that works well.

New computer maybe, so I can leave this one intact while I evaluate?

Ubuntu 10.10 updates

Ok, for a while now (since the summer and it was dearly hot) I have been running the Hardware Sensor Monitor applet so I can glance up and see what the mean temperatures are of my system components. I didn't want to have a literal meltdown.

So, I think this applet isn't playing nice with other items, specifically my Wally wallpaper changer.  On the last Ubuntu update (circa mid Oct 2011) something changed where the Sensor monitor and Wally collided. Rebooting didn't help. Deleting the applets and re-adding them to the panel seemed like the best bet.

Delete worked fine, re-adding gets sticky. Seems there is no Wally applet to readd, it just gets placed there at application startup. Uninstall and reinstall this application.  No good.  Remove the configuration directory ~/.wally and restart application. Still no good.  It is doing its thing, switching wallpapers, but I no longer have a way to adjust the preferences or push it to fetch a new picture.

Here is the solution that seems to be working well for me.

First I removed the hardware monitor sensor applet, since its going into winter I can probably be safe to assume the ambient temperatures will not cause my system too hot.

Second I reset the Gnome panel system. Not as scary as it sounds.

Do the following (on Ubuntu 10.10, not sure what will happen if and when I finally update to 11.x)

1 - open a terminal window.

2 - shutdown and remove the gnome panel system. (Top and bottom panels will disappear)
     gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel


3 - Clear out the old panel configurations
     rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel

4 - send a term signal to restart the panel system
     pkill gnome-panel

Both top and bottom panels reappeared and the missing Wally applet was there again. I had to re-add my favorite quick launches for Chrome and Terminal, but that's a small price to pay.

Ubuntu 10.10 Auto Update Fail (and solution YAY!)

So I am letting the Update Manager do its thing the other day, and it kicks an error that looked a bit suspicious.  Was saying something about a partial upgrade had failed and would I like to let it fix that.  Well, I know for a fact I did NOT allow it to upgrade to 11.04 as I don't want to break everything I have working. and I did not think this was a true and valid message.

I didn't want the system to blindly upgrade since I play some games under Wine and have read there are problems with the new Ubuntu which I don't want to deal with just yet.

Instead of letting the updater try and fix something that might force an unwanted upgrade I first went looking and found blog and forum postings similar to this (Ubuntu#root), that talk of several steps to take including verifying each application and selectively allowing the updates to occur.

In a word YUCK!, much too difficult a process. (first letter of the exclaim may be adjust to suit taste)

Instead I went to the Ubuntu IRC channel (#ubuntu) and posted the question "What is this message about a partial upgrade all about anyway?"

Almost immediately I get a simple answer on how to fix my local package archive.

  sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

My understanding is this was a hands free, simple check of all my repository connections with a leaning towards repairing my local package database and upgrade a package only if it does not impact other packages.

Whatever it did, it did it quickly and without any hassle from me.

Camera issue resolved

Ubuntu and digital cameras don't work well together for me, and from what I could find on the various forums, for other people too. Well, this problem only took about a year to puzzle out.  With many failed sessions of mounting and remounting the camera as a hard drive and copying the files over, then using the cool photo categorizing apps to sort through them

Turns out, and not sure what update finally fixed this, or at least got me to a workable solution.  But, if I dismount the camera from the desktop.  since it auto-mounts when you plug it in.  So, dismount the camera and then start the photo application.  It will now link and import photos from within the application.

This works for both of my current favorites. DigiKam and F-Spot.

Yeah!

Camera Woe

Ok, the Kodak Easy Share digital camera still won't connect to Ubuntu.  The front end photo management software (such as F-Spot) will not pull images from the camera, and I typically get an error " Error initializing camera: -60: Could not lock the device" even when trying to open.

I've seen some references to applying camera.app via synaptic (done that) and also about elevating user rights for the device (have not tested that).

But, the most promising so far is this, which I will try this evening and see if it provides any solutions.

Apply to U9.04 and Kodak DX7590 = OK ********************************

sudo gedit /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/20-libgphoto2.fdi
Search for "Kodak DX7590" (or your camera model)
Put in XML comment of this paragraph =

Reconnect your Kodak DX7590

Harder than it looks

I fully sympathize (empathize??) with people that maintain a weekly blog, let alone a daily blog.  I started this year to post some thoughts weekly.  And did fairly well for January I thought.  But, now February has come and gone and I didn't post a thing.  

Yes, work was a bit busier than normal, but you'd think I could squeak out a few minutes here and there.  I will try harder from now on though, and have lined up a few topics that should keep me going for a while.  Personal technology pains that I've had to deal with.

We'll see if I can time manage better as I go forward.

Temetum Lusus

Still working my Ubuntu 9.10 system into shape, and playing games on it to wile away the hours.  I've found some things that work very well, and some disturbing things as well.

The very well.  Again I wanted to see about pushing the video card a little bit.  I wasn't looking to find a FPS game to prove things out, I just wanted to see something that had 3D graphics, and would allow me to interact with the environment.  And, since it was/is a test I don't want to have to pay for it.

A little bit of searching, and I stumbled on Secondlife.  And found, I didn't have to fiddle with a windows installer under Wine.  Not saying anything bad about wine, but if there is a native client for anything, be it game or other app, it should be better than forcing it through a secondary system.  So, install this application is as simple as extracting the tar.bz file and then executing the startup script.

And, everything seemed to work right off.  Except. (there always is an expection)  It was apparently written specifically for RedHat, or at the very least a system that had KDE and not Gnome.  First things first, setup of your account is done through a web page, and not the viewer client.  So that done I start the client script and I see several errors flying by, a little worrisome, but the login is there.  Pressing on, I actually get into the system, and it appears that everything is rendering fine.  Since this is essentially a huge 3D rendered environment made for user interaction and chatting I wasn't really sure what to check out.  So, I went through the supplied tutorials, and found right away that my system would not play in game video's or in game sound.  (heavy sigh)

Referencing their secondlife wiki, and since this client is still beta release, I guess I shouldn't be too upset.  I verified that all the pre-requisite support software was loaded (for example minimum gstreamer 0.10) But in the end I find that there is a simple script setting commented out because it is still unstable.  Basically, review each of the known problems and solutions in the wiki.  For me just "uncomment the 'LL_BAD_ESD' line in the 'secondlife' script" and then going into the environment setup of the client to allow the streaming video and audio to flow through was enough.

The Disturbing.  And now to what I consider a disturbing, and as yet unexplained issue.  In facebook, there are a lot of games.  Most of them flash based, some of them interesting enough to play.   I had been having issues with them for as long as I could remember, and always just chalked it up to poor programming on the game writers part, or incompatibility with the supplied linux flash program.  The crux of this happens in FireFox, while accessing any flash game that opens a sub menu within the game itself.  Be this simple things like the poker games, or the farming games, or any of the various others.   If you go to open this sub menu, you get a cut-off weirdly truncated view with no active boundaries.  They just plain do not work.

I have found, purely by accident, and frustration that if I use the mozilla offshoot "Seamonkey" instead of the Ubuntu approved and supplied "FireFox" I have no issues at all.  And, after verifying support apps, I find that they are both running the same flash version.  I have gone through the typical troubleshooting as outlined on the firefox site, but no plugin or other add on appears to be the culprit.  Simple fact is though, it breaks in FF and it works in Seamonkey.   go figure.

Et Tu Printerus?

Printing under Ubuntu (under any flavor of Linux I'm sure) is not always as expected.  If its your local machine, with a directly attached printer, not that bad.  Like any other OS, you need to have the proper drivers, and luckily with the current state of driver development, many printers are supported.  Thought I think I would probably check for fully supported printers before purchasing my next one.

I have the Epson All In One printer NX-400, and as a printer it works just fine.  But, as a scanner, it is unrecognizable.  So also, is its faxing capabilities from the computer. Stand alone, it appears to be fine, also plugged into a Windows XP system it all appears to be fine.  But, hooked to my main system running Ubuntu 9.10, it has its sore spots.

First off the scanner portion is totally unrecognizable.  Trying several driver options, and settings, gets nothing to see.  Good thing I still have an old flatbed scanner that I use, and it works flawlessly.  All I really wanted from this NX-400 was a printer, so I am not totally upset about the scanner/fax.

So, all is happy in whooville?  Of course not.  As soon as I have the printer working, I get requests from everyone else in the family to be able to print to it.  Sigh.  So that's three Windows XP systems, and a Windows Vista system I need to get printer sharing out to from my Ubuntu workstation.  Maybe its time to deploy a home centered server solution (another day).

Some of this has been lost in a haze, and I'm a little bit reluctant to hear the cries and gnashing of teeth of our new printer going offline. (If I were to disable everything and start over verifying each step that actually worked)  From what I recall I took the first step of getting my printer working locally, and for that I assumed it needed to have the latest CUPS installed.  Fairly easy procedure under Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install cupsys cupsys-client

So now, right or wrong, I think I have the printer ready.  In order to configure my specific printer I have to start the Printer Configuration Tool which can be found under System ->; Administration ->; Printing.
Clicking the New Printer icon, you go through the simple dialog steps of configuring your printer, and if luck holds your printer is known by Ubuntu, and can be chosen from the pick list (If not, then a round of searching for apropos drivers will be needed, or buying a printer that is more linux compatable).  Anyway, I find my NX-400 in the list, and go to add, and Apply the changes.  (The install option in these dialogs is for installing a driver from a download, or external media.  but, most modern printers are already available and this step is typically not needed)  So, now I have a local printer, it shows as "Ready" in the Printers display, and all looks good.

Now to make my workstation serve out this printer as a sharable resource. Going back to the Printer Configuration dialog window, then on the menu bar selecting server and then settings to open up the basic server sharing configurations.


Since this is my workstation, and not a dedicated server, I decided to choose the two options Show printers shared by other systems and Publish shared printers connected to this system and then under the printer properties page I made sure the option Shared was set and click Apply.

On each of the Windows computers in the house network I ran through the following simple setup.

1. Control Panel -> Printers -> Add Printer
2. Use the Add Printer Wizard
3. Add a network printer
4. Choose connect to printer on the internet and type in the following format http://PRINTSERVERNAME:631/printers/PRINTERNAME (where the printservername is the IPaddress or DNS name for my Ubuntu workstation sharing out the printer and the printername is the name of printer being shared)
5. On the next screen choose the correct driver for this printer.  (In my case, Windows did NOT know what driver to use and I had to go download it from the Epson site, and come back to this step)
6. Print Test page

Interesting point here, is that all the printing worked until the Ubuntu system got rebooted, then no printing worked at all.  I verified the sharing options, and all previously installed components, and even checked to see if the CUPS daemon was running.  And, I even verified that my workstation reboot just didn't give me a new IPaddress from DHCP.  Yet it wouldn't print.

The fix in this case was to install Samba

Installing samba was nothing more than installing the following through the synaptic manager, and then modifying the conf file to allow for printer sharing.

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager    And then enter in samba for the search term and apply to install.

So once complete, open the /etc/samba/smb.conf and look for the section  on printers:

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

[printers]
   comment = All Printers
   browseable = no
   path = /var/spool/samba
   printable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   read only = yes
   create mask = 0700

# Windows clients look for this share name as a source of downloadable
# printer drivers
[print$]
   comment = Printer Drivers
   path = /var/lib/samba/printers
   browseable = yes
   read only = yes
   guest ok = no

And then restart samba

sudo /etc/init.d/samba reload

From here the Windows workstation is able to see the printers again, and has not had any problems losing configurations.

The whole ordeal to get the CUPS system working with a Windows client is weird and yet satisfying once its working.


Installing CUPS on Ubuntu
Installing SAMBA on Ubuntu