Crap, the blog archives are broken. Figures I’d find this out on the weekend. With the dog show going on this weekend I won’t be able to fix it until Monday. In the meantime you’ll just have to settle for the front page.
PDA sliding downhill
I have a feeling I may be surfing E-Bay in the near future for a used T3 to replace mine. The digitizer on mine is starting to go wacky, and to get it to work properly, I have to squeeze the sides.
I suppose I could take it apart to make sure everything is connected properly. The T3’s aren’t quite as trivial to disassemble as the Visors were though.
Scanner joy
Took a few days of research on various web forums and tinkering around with the system, but I finally managed to get the scanner (Epson Perfection V200) working under Fedora 8. Now it’s not a paperweight anymore! One more thing to take off the list. Woot!
In the hopes that this might help someone else who runs into this (or a similar problem), I’ll describe what worked for me.
Started off with using yum to install the SANE packages, but didn’t get anywhere with that. More Google and forum searching led me to the epkowa drivers (iscan-2.8.0-1.c2) so I downloaded and installed those. Got a little further, but still no joy.
Finally I uninstalled all the SANE and iscan stuff (which ended up uninstalling the printer drivers too, but those were easy to put back) and just installed iscan. That got me to the point where I could run iscan as root and scan stuff, but not as a regular user. Then I found a tip on a forum to edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf and comment out the epson line. Finally, scanner joy!
iscan doesn’t have nearly as many features as Epson’s Windows software but it works, I can use the scanner and it’s not a $70 paperweight anymore.
Summary (this is what worked for me):
- If you have sane/xsane installed, remove it with
yum remove sane xsane. On my system it also removed my printer drivers (hpijs and hplip), but they can be reinstalled afterwards. - Download the latest version of the iscan RPM and install with
rpm -ivh iscan-xxx.rpm - Edit
/etc/sane.d/dll.confand comment out the epson line. Make sure there’s a line that says ‘epkowa’ and that it’s uncommented. - You should be able to run iscan from a terminal window or launch Scanner Utility either from the Applications menu or the desktop icon
Fedora transition
It’s been a few days working with Fedora at home, and so far it’s going well.
Unfortunately I’m not able to completely dispose of Windows since I still need to use Quicken and there isn’t anything comparable available for Linux yet (that I’ve found anyway). Fortunately, thanks to the magic of virtual machine (VM) technology, that was one problem I was able to get around relatively easily. Downloaded and installed VirtualBox, followed the instructions to create a new virtual machine and booted it up with my Windows CD. Took a couple of days to get Windows and all the updates installed, but now I have a working Windows VM running in my Fedora install. This VM thing is pretty cool. A little slower than an actual computer, but not so much that it’s unusable. Now I just need to figure out how to get the VM to grab USB devices so I can use my PDA and scanner to get things into Quicken.
Moving on to Fedora
After experiencing numerous inexplicable problems (not seeing anything connected to the USB ports, not finding the DHCP server, no sound…the list went on and on) trying to get Windows XP running on the home computer (with new e-Bay’ed motherboard), I decided to wipe everything clean and install Fedora 8 on the darned thing.
Wouldn’t you know it, everything that wasn’t working in Windows worked again. USB, sound, network, the works. It’s almost like having a brand new computer. The only problem I ended up having was discovering a few things that got left off the backup I made. Nothing critical though.
Now I need to figure out how to get my PDA syncing, get Quicken up and running, and work on keyboard and mouse mappings.