Miscellaneous

On this page you will a collection of short notes about different pieces of hardware I somewhere had the possibility to try out, on which there was no documentation on the internet, and for which a short explanation is sufficient.

All comments, suggestions etc. are welcome. Please contact me at wf-hp@gmx.net.

Debian lenny - problem with keyboard in X / with xserver

After my dist-upgrade to Debian lenny setting the keyboard layout in /etc/X11/xorg.conf didn't work (on the console everything was fine). Probably this is related to the upgrade of the xkb-data package.
The fastest and easiest work-around is to add the following line to your .xinitrc / .Xsessionrc (of course adapting it to your correct keyboard layout):
setxkbmap -rules xfree86 -model pc105 -layout de -option nodeadkeys

Lexmark E210 GDI printer + Netgear PS121 printserver

With Windows

I wanted to have a small network print server in my LAN so I could switch off the computer the printer was connected to before.
I found information on some manufacturer's websites that their hardware wouldn't work at all with GDI printers, so I chose this thing from Netgear, because my printer wasn't on the incompatibility list (at least).

I bought the printserver, connected it to my LAN and ran the Setup-Program in windows. It found the printserver without problems and I assigned a fixed IP-adress.

Then I added a new (local) printer and chose the printer-share (LAN-Manager Printer Interface) of the printserver as the interface to be used. Then I finished the setup process and printed the test page - and it worked.

The other possibility is to use the IP-address as the interface instead of the printer share.
Select local printer, then TCP/IP-Interface, enter the IP-address, it will be converted automatically to IP_192.168.254.254, select LPR as the protocol (thanks for the correction :-) ) and enter lp as the name of the printer queue.

With Linux

With Linux it is just as simple.
Create a new printer in the CUPS web-interface, select LPD/LPR Host or Printer.
Enter as Device URI lpd://192.168.254.254/lp (of course replace the IP-address according to your setup).
On the next screens select Lexmark and Lexmark E210 Foomatic/gdi (recommended) (en) as the Model/Driver.
Then it should work and you can print the CUPS testpage.

Some interesting links:

Large collection of hints for USB Print Servers

Omnibook XE3 GC hotkeys

Finally I upgraded my old laptop to Debian testing/lenny and kernel 2.6. So now I am using the great omnibook kernel module from http://omnibook.sourceforge.net/. Everything is working well, only the hotkeys took me some minutes' search and playing around.

The problem is that compared to the old kernel patches for kernel 2.4 you don't get the keycodes of the hotkeys directly to use them with the hotkeys package, instead you have to use setkeycodes (as root) first to map the scancodes.

The second and more severe problem is that keycodes higher than 240 cannot be used, so you cannot use the same keycodes as with kernel 2.4.

These are the error messages:

When you have loaded the omnibook module without setting any scancode/keycode (at least you see that the module works):
atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0xf2 on isa0060/serio0).
atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e072 <keycode>' to make it known.

When you are setting scancodes/keycodes and use keycodes higher than 240:
setkeycodes e073 243 e074 244 e072 242 e071 241
Error message:
keyboard.c: can't emulate rawmode for keycode 242

Solution: use for example the following keycodes (check first with getkeycodes wheter these keycodes are not use yet):
setkeycodes e073 233 e074 234 e072 232 e071 231

The keycodes used for hotkeys in the .def-file are the following (small blue one touch keys from left to right):
<userdef keycode="142" command="firefox">Firefox</userdef>
<userdef keycode="213" command="xawtv">xawtv</userdef>
<userdef keycode="228" command="Eterm">Eterm@localhost</userdef>
<userdef keycode="218" command="Eterm -T Eterm@remote -e ssh remotehost">Eterm@remote</userdef>


Some interesting links:

Omnibook kernel module

hotkeys

Written 2007-02-07 - last update 2007-11-12