Configuring Ubuntu to access a wireless HP printer

hplip is an opensource project to support multiple HP printers on Linux. On Ubuntu 12.04 I already had this installed, but running ‘sudo hp-setup’ gave me this error:

kev@ubuntu:~$ sudo hp-setup

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.12.2)
Printer/Fax Setup Utility ver. 9.0

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

warning: Qt/PyQt 4 initialization failed.
error: hp-setup requires GUI support (try running with --qt3). Also, try using interactive (-i) mode.

A quick Google turned up this post, and installing hplip-gui installed the missing libraries and got me up and running.

sudo apt-get install hplip-gui

Starting up hp-setup again and following the wizard to point to the IP of my printer was all I needed to get my printer working.

Running Dropbox on Linux

Given that the Linux version of Dropbox installs itself to .dropbox-dist in your home dir, I often forget where it is (?) or how to start it.

Install instructions – here.

Start service running:

cd .dropbox-dist
./dropboxd

Or to run in background:

./dropboxd&

Leave running after logoff:

nohup ./dropboxd& > dropbox.out

 

Changing the gpu / main memory split on the Raspberry Pi

The memory allocation to the gpu is defined in /boot/config.txt using the gpu_mem property.

Minimum is 16, default is 64. If you’re running graphics intensive apps on the Pi you can increase this value. If you’re running in headless mode then you can decrease it to 16 or 32.

More info here.