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The Software Freedom Law Center has an interesting article about the Windows Hardware Certification Requirements: It wants hardware vendors producing ARM-based devices running Windows 8 to disallow the installation of alternative operating systems, using UEFI to lock the device.
People have been warning this might happen. Until now, Microsoft used to say "no, we're all about choice". Guess what.
Via LWN.
posted at: 18:26 | path: /en/computers/linux | permalink
For three weeks now, I've been back to Linux on my desktop. I decided to use Debian, mostly because it is what runs on my own servers, so I'm pretty familiar with it. I installed the current stable release, Squeeze.
Most things work out of the box.
One thing that did not work was printing PDF documents to my Brother MFC-7840W printer. All pages were shifted to the right and upwards, in spite of correct page size settings. PostScript files worked fine, as did converting PDF documents to PS using pdf2ps from the ghostscript distribution. Converting PDF to PS using poppler's pdftops (which is basically what CUPS uses) produced the problem.
Using Brother's binary drivers was not an option for me. I installed Debian to reduce my reliance on proprietary software, after all. Kudos to them for providing Linux support at all, though.
Google told me that the problem was an additional PageSize definition inserted by poppler in the PostScript prolog. And in fact, removing that part of the prolog from the files created by pdftops meant that the files printed correctly.
So I modified the cpdftocps wrapper script in /usr/lib/cups/filter/cpdftocps (here's a copy for download, and here's the diff) to remove the offending part of the PostScript prolog. I also added a file /usr/share/cups/mime/local.convs to invoke the new filter. If that file already exists on your machine, you might want to append instead of replacing it.
Here's the contents of /usr/share/cups/mime/local.convs:
application/vnd.cups-pdf application/vnd.cups-postscript 11 cpdftocps-mas
With this new configuration, printing works flawlessly.
And of course, scanning works perfectly, thanks to the FTP client on this multifunction printer. That's one of the main reasons I bought it. ;-)
In theory, I should now be checking whether the problem persists on Debian testing, and report the solution upstream if it does. After all, having poppler output better PostScript in the first place would be a lot more elegant.
posted at: 11:19 | path: /en/computers/linux | permalink
Am I the only one storing his private address book in LDIF, without an LDAP server of my own? I think vCard is too convoluted to edit directly, and address book solutions don't quite fit the bill. I actually tried to synchronize my phone with Google Contacts, but I gave up very quickly when it started losing phone numbers. So I'm back to LDIF.
LDIF is a beautiful format because it's trivial to edit and use, both from an editor and using standard tools. Most people seem to serve LDIF from their LDAP server. But it's often faster not to, especially on a personal computer.
Creating an interface to use an LDIF file as an address book in mutt took me all of five minutes. Here's the result, in case you're in a hurry. ;-)
posted at: 09:28 | path: /en/computers/linux | permalink