Lexmark 6200 with linux.

Purchased a couple of years ago or so, for about £200. Colour ink-jet printer, scanner. It may even print photos, I forget.

Anyway, Suse10: The printer shows up, but a test page doesn't work.

Hunting through Lexmark's site: no support for linux. No support for linux?
You fucking assholes, I may as well have donated the money to you. You cannot spare the salary of a single engineer to provide linux compatability? Well, fuck you. I will NEVER buy Lexmark again. With any luck, that's probably ten printers gone, over my life time. From a single person. Move with the times, Lexmark. Even when you do start to support Linux, I'll never buy from you again.

On a plus note, Brother printers seem to work well (so I'm told), and I know I got a Dell duplex laser printer to work well under linux. Pity Lexmark are so fucking pathetic as to not keep up. Well, a pity I didn't realise how shit they were before parting with my cash. It won't happen again.

Latex memory

The animation package has tips in Section 8. They were,

Find texmf.cnf:

$ kpsewhich texmf.cnf

As root, edit it. Change the main_memory entry to

main_memory=10000000

Actually, mine was already 1.5x greater than that.

Rebuild the formats (?) as,

$ sudo fmtutil-sys --byfmt latex
$ sudo fmtutil-sys --byfmt pdflatex
$ sudo fmtutil-sys --byfmt xelatex

burning bluray / cd

growisofs -Z /dev/dvdrw -R -J -allow-limited-size /home/ms/forBluRay

worked!

I had installed dvd+rw-tools previously. This burned at 4x, estimated time approx 1.5 hours to burn a disk.

Another page recommended,

growisofs -v -Z /dev/dvdrw -r -J -allow-limited-size -speed=1 -dry-run /home/ms/forBluRay/2/*

Lower case `r' is recommended for Linux. `v' is verbose. -dry-run marks a test.

CD:

To burn an iso:

wodim --devices

wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -data cd_image.iso

To create an AUDIO cd from a bunch of wavs (cool!):

wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -audio [wav files...]

where `v' is verbose.

Matplotlib bar charts.

from pylab import *
import numpy.numarray as na

labels = ['Other', 'Lib Dem', 'Warmongers', 'Posh twats']
data = [12, 23, 29, 36] # % data from the independent.
xlocations = na.array(range(len(data)))+0.5

width = 0.5
bar(xlocations, data, width=width)
ylim(0, 100) # a meaningful scale.
title("Voting proportions on a meaningful (%) scale")
gca().get_xaxis().tick_bottom()
gca().get_yaxis().tick_left()
xticks(xlocations+ width/2, labels)

Political memories, paper rubbish

Labour:

Illegal war under Tony Blair: huge protests not only in the UK but throughout Europe.

ACMD resignations over political pressure: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 members of the scientific community gradually withdraw from the board in protest. Public focus on the resignations makes no difference to the behaviour demonstrated by Labour.

http://ericcarlin.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/my-acmd-resignation-letter-to-the-home-secretary/



Tory:
Propose tax breaks for married couples. The break amounts to next to nothing financially, but the question remains: where would the money come from? Ultimately, from those who didn't get the break. The single person. It's ok though, as they'll raise the limit for inheritance tax up towards one million pounds, from the 250k or so it currently stands at. Bear in mind, the inheritance tax point has been changing with inflation (unlike some other tax break points), so this proposal is designed specifically, to benefit the rich.

Out of interest, how much do you need to earn to get a one million pound mortgage? At 3.5 times earning, approximately £300k. Not many degrees will get you there. That sort of money has to be inherited.


Lib dem:

Nothing bad to report, yet.


Independent reports on founding of `The big chill'. Source: wikipedia
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/10/balls_festival/


Daily Mail report iphone 4 recall: source twitter
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/28/daily_mail_fake_tweet/

Words and phrases of the day.

7/5/10: Abomination. (re: political outcomes)
6/5/10: Puerile.
7/5/10: Banal.
19/5/10: Irascible.

flv youtube downloads

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

voila.

There is more. Applications, software: install the restricted extras. Whatever: in firefox, about:plugins showed shockwave flash was installed and ok, when it was working. I had also installed smplayer and vlc a few minutes before.

I think it was probably the restricted extras that did it.