After six months or so of being wowed by a little portable scanner in a doctor’s office, the spouse and I finally decided to buy one.  I wanted one that’s compatible with Ubuntu, since that’s our main OS around home, so I did a little research, and found some info about the Plustek Opticslim m12 (it’s the same model that the “NeatReceipts” company rebrands for their own scanners).

Found one on Ebay, bought it (for 1/3 of the price of a NeatReceipts model), and plugged it in… and of course it didn’t work.  This is the world of Ubuntu with proprietary peripherals, of course.  The “Simple Scan” program that’s built-into Ubuntu recognized the make and model, oddly enough, but it wouldn’t scan, throwing up an error message whenever I tried.

I did a little bit of searching, and found a site that talked about it: http://www.fishandcross.com/blog/?p=844

Apparently, all you need to do is download the driver file mentioned from the site at http://gkall.hobby.nl/gt6816-07b3-0412.html and copy it to your /usr/share/sane/gt68xx folder.  Then, just start up the Simple Scan program again, and scan away!  Works really well — doesn’t auto-crop or anything like the provided Windows software does, but that’s cool.  I’ll take it.

To Visitors:  If you’re visiting this page, trying to find information about how to get this scanner to work, and you’re trying it years after this article was written, I can’t guarantee these instructions will work — if you know Ubuntu, stuff changes from version to version sometimes.  Hacks and fixes that’ll work one year won’t always work the next.

December 18th, 2011 | Science and Technology, ubuntu | No comments

I’ve been getting an Ubuntu server running recently (FINALLY), and in order to make it run headless (without keyboard, mouse, or monitor), there’s a few things one needs to do:

1) Enable Auto-Logins (optional)

All depends upon how you set things up, but you may want to run everything easily through a default user account — just go to “System > Administration > Login Screen”, and set it up.  (These instructions are for the GUI of Ubuntu, of course — I’m not a CLI-queen, and would rather edit things quickly through an interface that I’m familiar with than search forums for hours trying to find the esoteric commands necessary to do this stuff manually, sorry.)

2) Enabling Networking With Automatic User Login

Now, you may have set up automatic logins, but noticed that you always have to enter in your account password manually anyway once your network tries to connect — took me a while to figure out this one, but just go to “System > Preferences > Network Connections”, and in the type of connection you’ll be using, make sure the option for “Available to all users” is selected at the bottom.  That’s it.  I feel dumb for not figuring this out long ago.

3) Enabling VNC to Run Headless

As per the instructions I found here, you have to

1. Edit “/etc/gdm/Init/Default” to include the line “/usr/lib/vino/vino-server &” right before “exit 0″
2. Edit “/etc/gdm/custom.conf” (or “/etc/gdm/gdm.conf” if older than Ubuntu 10.04) and add “KillInitClients=false” — this will prevent any existing VNC clients from being killed if you do login on the server physically
3. Do a “sudo vino-preferences” and enable the necessary stuff

More to come, including the Minecraft configuration scripts!

June 24th, 2011 | computing, Linux, Programming, Science and Technology, ubuntu | No comments