A Networked Home

Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

I have an older Dell Inspiron 5100 notebook which I recently “fixed” by installing Linux Ubuntu 7.04 on. This laptop is primarily used by my wife. Our printer (Epson Stylus C86) is connected to the main desktop PC in the office. In order to share this printer wirelessly to the laptop a few steps had to be taken:

1: Click “Start”, “Printers and Faxes” and then right-click the printer you want share and choose “sharing”.

2: Click the “Share This Printer” radio button.

3: Now you need to move to the Linux PC and find the driver for your printer. You can try the web site for the printer manufacturer, but in most cases, they won’t have a Linux driver so you need to move to the open-source community. There are countless driver web sites out there. Here are 2 good ones:

Free Drivers Downloads

Driverscollection.com

4: On the Linux PC, choose “System”, “Administration” and “Printing”.

5: Choose “Windows Printer via SAMBA”.

6: Then browse your network for the printer (unless you changed it, your default network will be MSHOME - double click that and follow the trail to the printer)

This should be all you need to print wirelessly from your Linux box to a printer hooked to a Windows PC on your network!

I have an old Dell Inspiron 5100 Notebook that used to run XP Pro. A few months ago I decided to use it to try out Linux Ubuntu 7.04.

I will have more later on getting Ubuntu integrated into your home network, but for now I want to discuss the upgrade to 7.1 that I did yesterday.

I started by clicking on the “System” menu and choosing “Update Manager”. It told me that a new version was available and I chose to install it.

I had the laptop sitting on the kitchen table on the first floor of our home. I note this because we live in an old Victorian house and my office (and wireless router) are on the third floor. This is quite a distance, but despite that, I still get a pretty strong connection.

The download, installation, cleanup and reboot took a little over an hour and went unattended, except for one click on my part.

When 7.1 was up and running for the first time everything I had previously installed and set up was still there - the desktop folder, the Firefox bookmarks, the wireless printing, Evolution email, etc.

The only noticeable issue was that all of the graphics were slightly fuzzy and wavy. I tried rebooting with no improvement. As a last resort I changed the screen resolution from the native 1024×768 to 800×600 which cleared the problem completely, but is obviously a short-term solution.

I did a quick Google search for this and found several promising links, but so far I have not solved the problem.

For now I am still running 800×600 and the only real problem this causes is in Evolution, which seems to not be written to play nicely with this and forces me to move it around to see all sides of the program.