# apt-get install cups splix

Then go to the CUPS admin site at http://localhost:631/ and then Administration, Add new Printer, click through and select the splix driver for the ML-1610. That’s all.

I think the first time I tried I just hadn’t installed the splix driver… which is easy enough to find:

$ apt-cache search samsung driver

mencoder out.ogv -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts pass=1 -o out.avi

This will produce a video of good enough quality so that people can see what you are doing.

Here’s an example:

Please notice that mouse and click highlighting aren’t recordMyDesktop features.

I bought my camera at the end of april 2003 and after a few minutes of toying around i wanted to connect it to my favorite OS. I have been told that some of the stuff on this page will work with a powershot A70 or A75 too.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or solutions to any problems. But I’m in no way an expert. Please notice that I haven’t changed this page for a very long time and probably won’t update it any more.

Debian sarge comes with gphoto 2.1.5, I tested 2.1.3.

Preparations

gphoto2 and hotplug

# apt-get install gphoto2 hotplug

Kernel

I’m not sure but i guess stock Debian kernels should have all the USB stuff compiled in, if you build your own kernel figure out what you need reading the fine gphoto2 manual.

Connect the cam

Connect the camera to your USB port and and turn it on in replay mode. Try

$ grep Canon /proc/bus/usb/devices 

You will hopefully see something like

S:  Manufacturer=Canon Inc.
S:  Product=Canon Digital Camera

If not have a look at /var/log/messages. Does your kernel support USB?

Setting permissions

You don’t want to run gphoto2 as root, so follow the steps in /usr/share/doc/libgphoto2-2/README.Debian. If you don’t have a usb group yet create it (man addgroup) and remember to logout and login after adding yourself (man adduser) to the group. Change fstab and set the correct devgid there (man id).

I added the following line to my /etc/fstab:

none  /proc/bus/usb  usbfs devuid=0,devgid=1002,devmode=0660  0   0

First test

If hotplug found your camera try

$ gphoto2 --auto-detect

The output should be

Model                          Port
----------------------------------------------------------
Canon PowerShot A60            usb:

To download the first picture from your camera type

$ gphoto2 --get-file 1 

You will need at least one file (photo, movie) on the cam of course.

Gphoto2 drivers

The camera can be accessed by two different kind of drivers:

1. The PTP protocol is a manufacturer-independent picture transfer protocol. Libgphoto2 doesn’t fully support PTP completeley yet.
   There is also a project called jphoto that seems supports PTP but looks inactive, I haven’t tried it yet.
2. Canon protocol.

If you want to capture images with gphoto2 you need the ptp driver. This may work or not with the canon driver in the future.

Driver status

Comments:

1. the folder will be in capitals
2. the .deb in sid DOESN’T SUPPORT upload.
3. hm, can’t create a folder ‘folder’…
4. doesn’t delete everything properly (firmware bug?)

Note: Mixing the usage of both drivers seems to crash the camera.

More tools for the A60

• libptp is part of gphoto but there is a stand-alone tool included that uses it to set camera properties.
  You can’t do that with gphoto2.
• Petr Danecek wrote a tool for for periodic capturing for the A70.
  It should work with the A60 too (I didn’t test it yet).

More links…

• I love hugin to stitch my photos!
• Have a look at this page about the A60

EXT4-fs (sda1): Filesystem with huge files cannot be mounted
read-write without CONFIG_LBDAF

But… I don’t have any huge files on that disk. Not bigger than some DVD iso anyway.

After a few days I finally get the time to check the kernel configuration docs, and they say:

CONFIG_LBDAF:
 
Enable block devices or files of size 2TB and larger.
 
This option is required to support the full capacity of large
(2TB+) block devices, including RAID, disk, Network Block
Device, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and loopback.
 
This option also enables support for single files larger than
2TB.
 
The ext4 filesystem requires that this feature be enabled in
order to support filesystems that have the huge_file feature
enabled.  Otherwise, it will refuse to mount in the read-write
mode any filesystems that use the huge_file feature, which is
enabled by default by mke2fs.ext4.
 
The GFS2 filesystem also requires this feature.
 
If unsure, say Y.

Well, alright. mkfs.ext4 has said feature enabled by default. That’s what you get for building your own kernels and not reading everything in make oldconfig.

Edit: The feature can be activated at Enable the block layer ---> Support for large (2TB+) block devices and files, thanks to Arix.

Edit:: The feature can be removed from an existing filesystem by running the following commands:
tune2fs -O ^huge_file /dev/whatever
fsck /dev/whatever
This should allow you to mount the drive without CONFIG_LBDAF in the kernel. Thanks Marcus!

Usability

Tab Kit: My favorite tab extension. Has many many features, I use it mostly because it allow more than one row of tabs and tab grouping/collapsing.

Clear Fields: This solves a quite annoying issue with Firefox and the xorg clipboard. Xorgs lets you paste things that you have highlighted with the mouse by simply clicking the middle mouse button. However, the previous contents of the search and address fields don’t get cleared. This adds buttons to clear those fields before pasting.

Development and Webdesign

Firebug: The swiss army knife of web developer add-ons. To quote from it’s description: “You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page”. Very power- and useful.

Gridfox: Indispensable while making grid-based layouts or aligning text to a base grid.

Live HTTP headers: This is rather esoteric, but very useful for JavaScript debugging and web app development.

Web Developer: This is what I used before Firebug existed, and it’s still useful today.

MeasureIt:This is very useful for quickly measuring the size of various elements on a page.

Privacy/Security

Cookie Monster: The best cookie manager I could find. I always block all 3rd party cookies, and by default no website is allowed to store cookies on my computer. Cookie monster makes it very easy to allow cookies for sites I visit. Another nice feature is to only allow session cookies for some sites.

Flashblock: Blocks all annoying flash animations. Can whitelist sites of course. A must.

NoScript: Blocks all (3rd party) JavaScript. Indispensable security tool and gets rid of most ads as well.

Unfortunately the Powerbook’s display is broken and I can’t confirm it uses open firmware, but all sources I found say it does.

So I thought EFI GUID Partition support was not necessary, but it turns out that PPC macs can use that partition type as well, so CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION is necessary.

What’s great about openbox:

• it’s fast
• it’s based on blackbox (but has been completely rewritten) and has a dock
• it’s standards compliant
• chainable key bindings
• pipe menus, menu elements that are dynamically generated through small scripts
• nice tools like ObConf and ObMenu

I like a minimal configuration, my main workspace has just two terminals:

The transparent task bar at the bottom is tint2. The 0.7 version has an integrated systray which is nice, however the debian package is slightly outated. If your version doesn’t support the systray download the source from the tint2 page. My version oddly had a binary included in the src/ folder. If you need to compile yourself, apt-get build-dep tint2, go to the src/ folder, type make and copy the binary to some place that’s in your $PATH.

The openbox wiki seems to have all the documentation that’s necessary, like per application window settings.

The NIC

Make sure there’s a Linux driver for your network interface card. Make sure the card can be run in master mode.

DHCP

The boxes that will connect need an IP. Install dhcp3-server and do something like this in /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:

[...]
option domain-name "192.168.6.0";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.6.1;
[...]
subnet 192.168.6.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.6.10 192.168.6.15;
  option routers 192.168.6.1;
}
[...]

Configure the network

Configure the interface so that it can be started with ifup. Usually you want the connected boxes to have access to whatever internet connection the access point has, so I enable forwarding and masquerading in /etc/network/interfaces:

iface eth1 inet static
    address 192.168.6.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.6.0
    wireless-mode master
    wireless-essid debianftw
    wireless-key1 s:12345
    post-up /bin/echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
    post-up /sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE
    post-up /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart

13245 is the WEP password and the network will be called debianftw.

Optional: DNS

You may want to have name servers for the connected boxes. A quick solution is to take those from your /etc/resolv.conf and to put them in your /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf. There are other solutions, like a caching only DNS server.

Security

WEP isn’t a very good encryption but it’s enough for me. You probably don’t want to run this setup for a long time, it’s really just some notes to get me started quickly. Maybe I’ll add more about security in an update.

Anyway, the recording was done, so how do I fix it? I had already encoded mp3s with lame and wanted to fix the volume as quick as possible. A little research lead me to mp3gain. Wonderful little app that adjusts multiple mp3s so that they have the same volume. I used it to raise the volume of all mp3s by a certain value. What’s great about mp3gain is that it doesn’t reencode the mp3 but changes the volume in the mp3 file itself. I didn’t even know that was possible.

I just wish I had done this earlier, now I’ll need to reencode all that iPhoto and iDVD stuff.