Tech stuff: Elementary OS

2013/10/20

HP Printer Setup under Elementary OS

I bought an HP Photosmart 6520 printer as it is known to be well supported under Linux (http://www.matthartley.com/buying-a-printer-for-ubuntu/). Unfortunately the standard HPLip tool in the Elementary OS Software Center (actually the Ubuntu SC) has no support for this printer yet.

But you can directly download the latest hplip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/hplip/ and simply run it in a terminal.

sh ~/Downloads/hplip-3.13.10.run

With Ubuntu 13.04 this works flawless, but under Elementary OS it complained about some missing dependencies. By executing the following steps I could get the latest hplip tool running:

set a temporary root password as it insisted on not using the sudo command:
```
sudo passwd 
```

install required dependencies:

sudo apt-get install gcc build-essential python-dev libcupsys2-dev libusb-1.0.0 libtool libcupsimage2-dev  libsane-dev libsnmp-dev

Now the hplip script should work fine (I selected "Ubuntu" and "13.04"):

sh ~/Downloads/hplip-3.13.10.run

You can install your HP printer with a USB connection:

hp-setup

or add a networked printer with (modify the command with the ip-adres of your printer):

hp-setup 192.168.0.212

My HP printer is now fully operational, including the integrated scanner.

Don't forget to remove the root password afterwards:

sudo passwd -l root

2013/10/06

Enable MTP support on Elementary OS

I'm currently running Elemantary OS on a Medion E1210 (Akoya) netbook as ubuntu became too heavy. The netbook has been upgraded with a 128GB SSD from Kingston and is operating very smooth considering the limited cpu. One small problem remains: my Nexus 4 only mounts as a "Media Transfer Protocol' device (MTP) instead of the classical USB Mass Storage device.

Luckily, it's very easy to add MTP support to Elementary OS by executing the following commands in a shell :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:langdalepl/gvfs-mtp 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade

After reboot, the nexus 4 was mounted properly.

source: http://jaisejames.wordpress.com/tag/elementary-os/