Tag: ubuntu

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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.

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Installing XBMC media center on a HP Mini netbook

I’ve been setting up XBMC media center on an old HP Mini netbook as an experiment to listen to streaming radio via my home theatre setup. I started initially with the XBMCbuntu iso since it was the easiest to setup, but the Ubuntu side of this distro was too slimmed down for my liking. It didn’t come with drivers for the wifi card out of the box, so while I was planning on connecting via ethernet close to my home theatre setup, I still wanted to pickup the netbook and use wifi while working on setting it up.

So my next attempt I went for a full Ubuntu 12.10 desktop install (wifi drivers included), and then followed the manual steps to install XMBC next.

My main interest in XMBC is the Radio Add-on that has a menu of selectable streaming radio stations. My next interest is being able to control the radio selection remotely, either via a web interface or via an Android app. All the web interfaces, including the default interface, don’t seem to let you browse the Radio add-on. I’ve found one Android XMBC remote that does, so this one does what I need:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.berard.xbmcremotebeta

My next interest is running Spotify on the netbook and also controlling it remotely. Two choices here, either

  • Use a Spotify Add on for XBMC, like Spotimc
  • Or install the Spotify for Linux client, and then use one of the many Spotify remote apps to control it directly

Given that I haven’t had much luck with XBMC remotes controlling XBMC add-ons, I’m going to try a separate Spotify install and then try out one of the remote apps, like this one: Spotcommander. I’ll post an update once I’ve got these installed and configured.

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Resetting a password on Ubuntu

If you’ve forgot your user password on Ubuntu, you can easily reset it if you have a recovery option in your Grub menu. Boot into recovery mode, select the root shell option, then use passwd to set a new password for your user. Further details here.

If you get this error:

Authentication token manipulation error

then your drive is mounted in read only mode. If you have an option in your recovery menu to mount in r/w mode, then do that first then drop back into the shell. Otherwise you can mount it yourself with this:

mount -rw -o remount /

More info here.

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