Category: Computing

Sharing a Mac printer with Linux

Our printer is plugged into the Mac as this is the primary machine we use for printing things.  My desktop is a Linux box, and until today I simply copied the files up to the network drive and printed them using the Mac.

Quite some time ago I came across an article on Building a heterogeneous home network for Linux and Mac OS X which is pretty much the situation I have here at home.  I’ve been working on making the network the important thing, and the computers simply use the network services.  Eventually I may simply move the printer to be on the network and run off my Slug, but its easier to let the Mac just talk to it directly right now.

Enabling the Mac to share the attached printer is very simple.  From the Apple select System Preferences.  Then you want to find the Sharing icon and click on that.

The Sharing page is pretty self explanatory, but I’ve got some screenshots to make it painfully obvious if your not sure.  You want to check the box that says Printer Sharing.  Also check on the Firewall tab that you won’t have a problem with blocking the required ports.

That’s all you need to do on the Mac. Now off to Linux.  I run Ubuntu, so other distros will have different paths to the same basic functionality.  Under System->Administration->Printing which will open up the printer configuration.  We want to add a New Printer.

The new printer will be an IPP Printer.  Fill in the Host, then use the Find Queue button to locate the queue that the Mac is exporting.  I found that for whatever reason the system then mapped the hostname to localhost (127.0.0.1) which is wrong – so I manually changed it back.  Verify was good to check things were cool.

Now I can print from my Linux box.  I probably should have done this ages ago, if I had known how trivial it was going to be I would have done it much sooner.


Acer Aspire One – Initial Impressions

Well, despite my successful installation of a DIY solid state drive – the old laptop continued to develop new problems (the keyboard started to get sticky keys).  I did agonize over buying something new (or maybe a used ThinkPad) and finally settled on one of the new netbooks – the Acer Aspire One.

Now while it is primarily going to be Jenn’s machine, I will get to tinker with it.  Tonight I spent some time getting it on our network, downloading updates and then installing VNC so she can remote to her Mac.

Out of the gate the Aspire One is way more machine that the old clunky laptop we had.  Its fast, small, 11G wireless and has working sound.  It boots to the UI in about 20 seconds, but you’ve got to wait another 10 seconds or so for the wifi to connect.

One annoyance was the fact that the initial setup process doesn’t allow for passwords with punctuation in them – I fixed that by getting into the terminal and changing the initial password.

The process to do that is as follows: Go to Files > My Documents to open the File Manager. Then go to File > Terminal.  Its actually pretty trivial, but this is the gateway into adding more software.

Once in the terminal you can modify the XCFE settings by running the xfce-setting-show command: Click on Desktop to get to the Desktop Preferences and choose the Behavior tab. Now mark under Menus the Show desktop menu on right click option and close the window.  Once you’re done here, right click one the desktop background will bring up the Desktop Menu.

The Aspire One users call the above the “Advanced Mode” hack.  The primary reason to do it is to enable the Add/Remove Programs function (the Package Manager).

Now before you get going, you will want to fix the root password.  Thankfully this is trivial: Simply launch a terminal and sudo bash to get a root shell, then use passwd to fix things.

At this point you can run the package manager from the Desktop Menu, provide the root password and away you go.  As I mentioned, I chose to install a VNC viewer.  This worked fine, but the normal home screen menus did not pick up the new application (the Desktop Menu did).

To modify the home screen menus you need to edit /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml and add a line something like: 
<app sequence=”10″>/usr/share/applications/vncviewer.desktop</app>
You will need to reboot to get it to show up.

So far, its a very cool gadget for a fairly reasonable price.  Once we’ve had it a while, I’ll write up a proper review.

Reverse DNS

My previous ISP supported static IPs, but I never bothered to chase after them to provide a reverse DNS mapping for my domain.  Now that I’m using NCF DSL, the admins there are able to accommodate my request for a reverse DNS mapping.

Having a proper PTR record isn’t critical.  For years, even prior to having a static IP, I was hosting a webserver using dynamic DNS.  Once I had a static IP, I was able to reliably host my own email – however there were a few friends who’s ISPs were pretty aggressive about tagging email from my domain as spam.  While my static IP wasn’t on any blacklists, it didn’t pass the Forward Confirmed Reverse DNS test (FCrDNS).

As of this weekend, lowtek.ca will pass a FCrDNS test – which in theory will help email flow more smoothly.

Most of my friends have opted for much simpler configurations.  Using either a hosting company to provide their domain services, or in at least one case using the free version of Google Apps For Your Domain to handle email.  Certainly much simpler – but from my point of view, not nearly as much fun.