This is my lastest desktop scenery. Salix OS with Openbox WM, Tint2 panel and VLC & Orage calendar!

This is how I got my Brother USB MFC-5440CN working. There are other instructions for Brother Printers on there site, for other models also. I know these instructions will work for my printer on Salix OS 13.37.

First, before anything else make sure that the printer is hooked up and on before you start. ** Optional** Also, make sure that /etc/rc.d/rc.cups is executable. ( chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.cups )

Download the correct LPR Driver & Cups wrapper from their site.
Note: download the Red Hat driver (rpm) not the Debian package.

http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bs ... index.html

Create a new directory and put both drivers in it and change to that directory.

At this point go ahead and su into the root account.

According to Brother you must use a c-shell to install the package. tcsh is already installed on my system.

Convert the rpm packages to native Slackware tgz packages using rpm2tgz.
Example: rpm2tgz MFC5440CNlpr-1.0.2-1.i386-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm
Example: rpm2tgz cupswrapperMFC5440CN-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm

Install the newly created packages.
Note: you must install the LPR package first per Brothers instructions.

Even though you installed the cupswrapper it did not work because of a missing link. Slackware does not use /etc/init.d/cups it use /etc/rc.d/rc.cups so lets fix that by creating a softlink.

ln -s /etc/rc.d/rc.cups /etc/init.d/cups

One more thing, now we need to do what the install could not do since it was not linked correctly.

Change to the Brother directory

cd /usr/local/Brother/cupswrapper/

Now, run the cups wrapper

./cupswrapperMFC5440CN-1.0.0

You should see that cups was restarted and all you have to do now is setup your printer with "localhost:631" from your web-browser.

This information was written to help a newbie like myself who is trying to learn how to use my older printer with non RPM or DEB drivers. My intention was not to write a "howto" but to help out others.

I would like to thank all who's information I got from google and Slackware users that help me figure out how to set this up. Especially from http://www.linuxquestions.org.

Thnx.

For the holiday weekend, I went and checked out the St. Louis Big Muddy Blues Festival on Saturday and Sunday nights. I had a wonderful time and the one band was super good Saturday, I'm sorry to say but I forgot the name, I like how they ended the night with Howlin' Wolf's 'Shake it for Me' song.

Sunday night it brought in David Dee and his band, they also gave a pretty performance. Again I enjoyed it and so did the wife.

I do have a few pictures I took with my cheap cell phone cam.

Curt Flood's daughter keeps his Hall of Fame hopes alive

More than 20 years after Robinson integrated baseball, Curt Flood changed the game again at a fundamental level, when he sacrificed his career to fight baseball’s longstanding policy of treating players -- as he said in the famous letter to Bowie Kuhn upon his unwelcome trade to Philadelphia in 1969 -- “like a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective to my wishes.’’

“Because of what he did for baseball, he deserves to be in,’’ Shelly Flood, his daughter and one of his four surviving children from his first marriage,’’ said earlier this week. “Obviously, a lot of people are determined to keep him out just because of that. But look at what he did just as a player. He deserves to be in for that, too.’’

To her, Friday at Jackie Robinson Day seemed to be an appropriate time and place to bring her quest to the public. So she is leading a group of 40 supporters who will be in attendance, wearing T-shirts printed with “Put Curt Flood In the Hall of Fame,’’ and will be acknowledged on the scoreboard during the game.

Flood herself, who lives in southern California, will be wearing a Cardinals jersey – in honor of the team her father helped win three pennants and two World Series titles during his 12 years with them. Coincidentally, it’s also the team the Dodgers play that night, in a stadium where a fan wearing an opposing team jersey was beaten into a coma two weeks ago.

“I don’t care,’’ she said with a laugh. “That’s my father’s team.’’

Shelly Flood also co-moderates a Facebook group – “Put Curt Flood In the Hall of Fame’’ actually was started by a pair of acquaintances two years ago, and when she discovered it by accident, she agreed to help administrate it. It now has nearly 2,500 members, many of whom joined in the wake of publicity for the 40th anniversary of Curt Flood’s suit against baseball.

I'm currently using Mageia 1 Linux, a fork of Mandriva linux and I must say it has turned out to be very well done. I originally installed KDE but use Openbox window manager more and more now days.

I just recently installed a new Linux OS distribution (Mageia) that is still in the alpha/beta stages. It is based on Mandriva which uses the RPM packagemanager system. This is my story on giving it spin!


I finally was able to install Mageia on this new/old HP dx5150 AMD64 40gb hard drive. I wanted to wait till the weekend since I've been working 12 hrs/5 days shifts for the past couple of weeks, but hey, who doesn't want to try out the new kid on the block ASAP!

I tried during the alpha stages to install it on another old IBM machine in virtualbox but it stopped at the installing grub stage, so I end up aborting and wait for the next release. Since I purchased the HP machine and already had partition the drive in half, Win 7 x64 is installed on it, so I wanted to do a compare of OSes with Gnome. I downloaded the dual arch cd, which I didn't quite know what's on it other than 32/64 bit OS.

After booting up the cd, I didn't realize it was going to install the 64bit ver. by default, I assume it knew this was a 64 bit machine, I was thinking of using the 32 bit. I thought it would give you an option to pick which one to use. Another thing, during the installation, when it came to DE/WM option, it had LXDE checkmarked by default and I unchecked it and chose Gnome. To my surpise after installation, it booted into LXDE. This is why the installation was the fastest I've seen in a long time. Even after I installed a small Gnome without all the bells & whistles, it had to finish within 30 mins. of total install. Getting my WiMax usb/wireless router going was no big deal, it just wasn't picked up during the installation stage, or I didn't figure out how to set it up, so that may be why Gnome & LXDE were the light versions. (No internet access until after the complete install).

Overall, I'm pretty impressed from what I've seen so far, the devel team keep doing what they are doing, this could be a very nice distro for years to come. One other thing I don't like that default green color on the login screen, it reminds me of Opensuse, no offense. I'll work on changing it as time goes on. So for now, this is my first impression and I'll keep you informed of how things are going.

Steve

Gas Prices Level Off After Huge Run-Up

The good news for motorists this week is gasoline prices have stopped going up. The bad news, of course, is they are at the highest point in three years after weeks of rapid increases.

The average price of self-serve regular gas today is $3.540 a gallon, about the same price as seven days ago, according to AAA's Fuel Gauge Survey. But prices are 41 cents a gallon higher than they were a month ago and 75 cents a gallon higher than the price a year ago.

Diesel fuel prices, meanwhile, are closing in on the $4 a gallon mark, with the average price $3.929, about a penny higher than seven days ago.

Gasoline prices are only now beginning to slow down, reflecting this week’s sharp drop in oil prices, in the wake of Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami. Energy analysts expect Japan’s oil imports will drop sharply until it begins to recover from the disaster.

However, oil prices rose back above the $100 mark early Friday after the United Nations decided to intervene in Libya’s civil war. Because of the ongoing uncertainty in that part of the world, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts the national price of gasoline will hit $3.70 a gallon this summer and could cross the $4 mark by the fall.

At least one state, Hawaii, already has an average gas price above $4 a gallon and another, Alaska, is not far behind.