Hackity, Hackity, Hack!

You can tell I’ve been GIMP’ing again, can’t you?

Can’t you?

You can?

Oh, good!!

Just thought I’d mention it …

Now I’ve got to admit, I’ve been getting mildly frustrated by the fact that there’s a lot of hacking away at Allison’s problematic laptop, today.

She’d been having problems, as, until she updated the version of Jaunty Jackalope on her Ergo Preceptor 4 laptop, about a fortnight ago, she’d been able to use the Canon MP140 printer-scanner-copier, she’d been given a few weeks ago without a hitch.

Beyond that point, however?

Or with Karmic Koala installed?

Diddly squat, to use a phrase.

So I spent a frustrating morning, trying to track down various online resources, to see if I could either find a driver from the Canon website — without luck, as it goes — or find something on the Ubuntu forums.

Again, without luck; most of the course of action, there, were for older model Canons, running under earlier distributions of Ubuntu.

However, I was able to find Foomatic, in the Ubuntu Software Centre, which can seemingly interface with many popular brands of printer, to let laptop and printer communicate freely.

What seems handy to me, is that Foomatic seems to able to work well with HP branded printers.

Which is handy, as that’s the brand of printer I use, myself; I currently have an HP Deskjet 2153 printer-scanner-copier sitting at my feet, as I write.

And it was also one I found worked well, once plugged into her laptop, roughly an hour or so, ago. (I also found using Karmic Koala’s onboard XSane scanner system fairly easy to use; once I’d realised that the ‘Acquire Preview’ button — which makes a scanner scan — , and the ‘Scan’ button — which then saves the resulting picture to where-ever you want to save it — are in two separate windows. To be frank, I know XSane’s a fairly generic piece of kit, but I’m thinking the HP scanner drivers for Mac OS X seem a touch more simplistic labeled; ‘Acquire Preview’ becomes ‘New Scan’, for example, and ‘Scan’ becomes ‘Accept Scan.’ That seems a touch more explanatory, if you follow me?)

It also help’s that HP have — accord to the various Ubuntu Forum threads I read for this — put in a lot more work, supporting as many platforms and operating systems as possible. Yes, I know that’s them trying to earn as much money as possibly.

But I for one, aren’t going to quibble.

The first thing I learnt, as a Mac owner, was to read the back of the box, on any given piece of computer gadgetry, to see if the included driver-disc had OS X drivers with it; HP always seemed to be one of the few printer companies that put out Mac drivers on a regular basis.

Remind me to tell you about the digital picture key-ring my mother got me for Christmas a few years ago …

At any rate, while I’m not sure if Allison’s laptop will work with her Canon, I do know I’ll be able to tell her it’ll work with both my HP all-in-one, and one that she herself has her eye on.

Given that we’ve had a rough few days, I feel that’s the least I can do for her.

•••••

I also know I had Kevin over again, today, bless his proto-silver-surfing hairdo!

Nicely moody shoot of Kevin, there, actually …

I’ve got to admit, I was showing Tim and Adele, the other day, how use GIMP to ‘cut out’ area’s of a picture so they could glue it to a different background.

Tim, remind me to blame you for that Heather’ed shot of Adele …

He says, grinning …

Anyway, Kevin wondered over, today, mostly because he was having trouble finding one or two .html files I’d saved for him.

Once he realised that he’d been clicking on the wrong icons, though, he was fine.

Mildly embarrassed, but fine!

I think, as a member of an older generation, he wasn’t as familiar with technology as many others; Kevin’s a semi-retired psychologist, so hadn’t been a front line computer user, in the same way as — for example — his secretary or receptionist would have been. (By contrast, my Mum’s only a few years older than Kevin, and a telephonist/receptionist, at a big local company for years. And familiar enough with the technology to add and remove people from the telephone system, as needed.)

I do know I also had to walk him through the little I knew of Freemind, as well; not the easiest of things, as it’d been a while since I’d used it.

Basically, Freemind’s what’s called mind-mapping software; in other word’s, it let’s you draw spider-graphs and insert links to other files, on or off line. It’s a convenient way of organising your thoughts.

I think he’s happy about having it; he’s trying to write a book, at the moment, so the mix of OpenOffice.org, and Freemind looks like its something he can use.

As was the little collection of keyboard shortcuts I put together for him …