Downloads needed files:

Zotac ZBOX BIOS update package pa113.zip
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool HPUSBFW
USBDos usbdos.zip

http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm

BIOS Update (optional):

(do it on your own risk !!!)

1. Download all the files above
2. Unpack the files
3. Plug in usb stick
4. Start hp tool
5. Choose your usb stick, filesystem: fat32, create a dos startup disk and choose the folder with the unzipped usbdos files, click Start
6. Copy afudos.exe from the unzipped pa113.zip to the stick
7. Copy N1210WMA.rom from pa113 folder to the stick
8. Plug in the stick to the zotag mag, power on and go directly into the bios
9. Choose the right boot order and save the changes and reboot
10. ZBox should now boot from the usb stick
11. On the command prompt type the following command:

AFUDOS A1400825.ROM /B /P /N /X /C

12. After successful ROM update, power off ZBox, unplug usb stick and power on again

These instructions were gleaned or adapted from the following sources. Some other useful links are included

Step-by-step (although out-of-date) install of Ubuntu and XBMC. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=68653

Speed boot time with minimal footprint linux distribution. http://openelec.tv

To get audio working via HDMI:

Add to the end of the options in /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf:
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 probe_mask=0xffff,0xfff2

Here are some useful sites about the HD-ID11 in general:
Pieter Viljoen’s Blog: Zotac ZBOX Mini-PC ZBOXHD-ID11
XBMCFreak » Nvidia ION
XBMCbuntu – XBMC

To enable awake from suspend with remote:

I configured XBMC to go into suspend mode (ACPI S3 state), and can normally be woken up by pressing the power button (which blinks red and green in suspend mode). However, since it’s mounted to the back of our TV, the button is hard to reach, so I want to wake it up using my wireless USB remote (Lenovo multimedia keyboard).

Follow these instructions Awake from Suspend with Remote. You have to know the USB port mapping:

USB3: Port on front next to card reader, but maybe it’s the device number assigned. Anyway, USB3 worked for me.
Issue the command

sudo sh -c "echo USBx > /proc/acpi/wakeup"

where x is the USB port station, which will toggle between disabled/enabled for the given device. until suspend/wakeup works via the USB device. The sh -c command extends sudo rights through the whole command in quotes. If everything works correctly, see if /proc/acpi/wakeup is preserved on reboot. Mine was not, so I added the above command (without sudo) to /etc/local.rc (make sure the execute flag is set on local.rc)

1. Using Unetbootin, copy the .iso to the USB (make sure the USB dev is correct before starting)
2. Open the syslinux.cfg file in the USB root directory and add “cdrom-detect/try-usb=true” to the “menu label default” entry after “append … — ” so that it reads:

    label unetbootindefault
    menu label Default
    kernel /ubnkern
    append initrd=/ubninit vga=normal -- quiet cdrom-detect/try-usb=true

3. Boot to the USB and run the default installer. It still had an error after installing the base system, but I just ran the step again (I think I unselected the ubuntu-desktop package, then just installed it from the terminal later) and it worked fine.

It’s not hard to set up the printer as a network printer (without the included Windows/Mac setup utilities). The MX860 has wireless capabilities so we can put it anywhere convenient within reach of our router signal and a power outlet, which is nice. I found out that only so much network configuration can be done through the printer’s onboard menus. Here’s the general setup procedure I used.

1. Connect the printer’s ethernet to the router
2. Read the DHCP’ed IP address from the printer
3. From any computer on the network, browse to that IP address
4. Set up the wireless settings (SSID, encryption, etc.) to match you network
   Choosing to obtain an address automatically or a static IP address doesn’t really matter since clients will look for the printer by mac address anyway
5. Activate wireless on the printer and make sure you can still connect
6. On the clients (Ubuntu 9.10, AMD64 and i386 CPUs), follow these instructions:
   http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?action=printpage;topic=3111999.0
7. After the printer is installed via System->Administration->Printing, set the Canon-MX860 to duplex printing (by default) on the Printer Options tab.

But I still had a problem running the scanner from the xsane interface (or, equivically, running scanimage -T from the terminal). I always got:  “FAIL Error: Operation was cancelled”. I found this wonderful post that explains how to fix it:

http://harbhag.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/canon-pixma-mp258-or-any-mp250-series-printer-on-ubuntu-debian-fedora-and-arch-linux/

or

http://mp610.blogspot.com/2008/04/give-your-scanner-new-freshly-sane.html

To get this working, here are the steps to take:

1) You need some usb libraries, so, in a terminal type:

sudo apt-get install libusb-dev build-essential libsane-dev

2) To get the sane backends from git you need git-core. If you don’t already have it, type this (also in a terminal):

sudo apt-get install git-core

3) Now use the git that was just installed to get the sane backends using the following command:

git clone git://git.debian.org/sane/sane-backends.git

That downloads the backends and puts them in a folder called sane-backends in your home folder.

4) Change directory into the new sane-backends folder and compile them:

cd sane-backends

./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –localstatedir=/var

make <— this one takes a while

sudo make install

Now everything is installed, but you still won’t be able to scan (except as root) until you set up some permissions.

5) You need to edit a file, but you need to be root to edit it, so:

sudo gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/40-libsane.rules

and add the following 2 lines:

# Canon CanoScan Lide 100
ATTRS{idVendor}==”04a9″, ATTRS{idProduct}==”1904″, ENV{libsane_matched}=”yes”

save the file, exit gedit, exit terminal, reboot, and…

Everything works!

Your computer power supply is rated in Watts, just like light bulbs, and is built into the design of the whole computer to handle the maximum power load that all the hardware could possibly require. For average systems, that maximum rating is somewhere between 250-400 Watts. However, higher-end hardware such as hefty video cards for gaming or large monitors, multi-core processors, cooling fans, multimedia encoding/decoding, optical disc drives (say, burning DVDs), multiple or high-speed hard drives, or other power-hungry components can bump that peak demand above 1000 Watts. Most of the day you probably float at less than half your peak power. Even so, your computer can easily draw 100 Watts idling. Did you ever think of your computer as an extra light in your house, one that you leave on when you leave the room, or, like some people I know, while you’re sleeping? Sure, I try to turn off my computer when I don’t need it (I usually get more done then anyway), but sometimes it’s just not practical. When that extra proverbial light bulb needs to be on, wouldn’t it be nice to dim the lights when only need mood lighting or you leave the room, while still enjoy the brightness when you need it? Enter Granola.

Granola is software that does just that. It emerged out of beta on Earth Day 2010 and, best of all, it’s free and runs on Windows and Linux, and may be planned for Mac OSX down the road. Formerly MicroMiser, Granola was renamed to “more accurately capture our goal of making a serious impact on the planet through the reduction of wasted energy,” says MiserWare, the company behind Granola. According to the email they sent me announcement the newest version: “There are over a billion personal computers in the world. Together, they consume hundreds of billions of kilowatt hours annually. If each of these computers ran Granola and reduced their power consumption by even 10%, it would be like taking 7 million cars off the road. Or planting 900 million trees. Or turning off 65 coal power plants.” So far, they claim that the Granola community has saved as much CO2 as tens of thousands of trees. That’s assuming that every download equates to “average saving” of 56.9kWh and runs on a computer 24/7. Even though it seems that reported numbers are best-case scenarios based on assumptions and averages, I think more awareness of green aware computers is needed. And to be honest, if there’s any chance of reducing my home power use, I’m interested.

I have Granola running on three linux computers at home: a newer quad-core CPU computer, an older single-core CPU computer, and a small server with an low-power Intel Atom processor. Granola saves a bit over 45% CPU energy on all three, and claims to save about $25/year each, after setting our local energy rate to $0.10/kWh. Scale that by how often they’re on, and the savings comes to about $40/year. My wife claims to notice her computer runs a bit slower, but I don’t notice much change on mine. Next step is to find a Kill-A-Watt meter to check the power savings.

But Granola can only throttle the CPU power. Other managements are built into your operating system to quell power draw, such as timed monitor power-down, spinning down the hard drive, or hibernating, which are especially appreciated on laptops. The sure-fire hacks to save computer energy still remain: use laptops instead of desktops, turn them off when not in use, and don’t buy higher performing systems than life demands. But if those don’t work for you, Granola can bring some peace of mind and a little green to your CPU.

MicroMiser – an intelligent software power management solution for x86 servers, laptops, and PCs running Linux

Activity Journal – There are so many indexing tools out there. Here’s another.

Once up and running, these are the packages I like to have handy on my desktop clients (um, besides the defaults):

Eye Candy

• gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks (which uninstalls human-theme, ubuntu-artwork and ubuntu-desktop)
• blubuntu-theme (I like this look)
• cairo-dock (a glorious mac-like application launcher)
• compizconfig-settings-manager

Utility

• sun-java6-jre – Sun Java 6 Runtime
• virtualbox-3.1

  deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian karmic non-free
  wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

• nautilus-dropbox (DropBox is a great little peer-to-peer syncronization application)

  deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu karmic main
  deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu karmic main

  Then install:

  sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox

  Log out and log back in.

• keepassx (KeePassX password manager, compatible with Window’s KeePass)
• p7zip (7zip compression utility. Compresses better, although not faster, than regular zip files)

Graphics

• gthumb (my personal quick image viewer with basic image manipulation tools)
• picasa3
  - download and install the .deb package from Google directly
• inkscape (an exceptional vector drawing program akin to Illustrator)
• scribus (desktop publishing)
• ttf-mscorefonts-installer (Microsoft core fonts)
• fontmatrix (a system font viewer)

Media

• ubuntu-restricted-extras (Proprietary encoders and decoders that don’t ship with Ubuntu)
• libdvdread4
• vlc (about the best media player out there)
• k3b (CD/DVD burner and ripper)
• libk3b6-extracodecs (extra k3b libraries for mp3, ffmpeg and video DVD support)
• songbird
  Easiest to install via getdeb.net
• handbrake

Internet

• thunderbird – Thunderbird (with Lightning extension)

Office

• openoffice
• lyx-common (an excellent LaTeX interface)
• jpilot
• gnucash

Science

• scilab – SciLab
• maxima – Maxima
• labplot – LabPlot

Kid Games

• Extreme Tux Racer
• Potato Guy
• Torcs
• Supertuxkart
• ChildsPlay
• Tux Paint

Fonts

Sometimes I like to break out of the standard font mold and use some more upbeat fonts. There are probably way too many fonts in the following packages, but I’ll have to sort that out later. I use Fontmatrix to view them.

sudo apt-get install ttf-sil-gentium sun-java6-fonts ttf-larabie-deco \
ttf-larabie-straight ttf-larabie-uncommon ttf-sjfonts ttf-georgewilliams ttf-dustin

Other Notes

Firefox

Extensions added:

• AdBlock Plus
• XMarks
• Download Statusbar
• Firegestures
• Googlebar Lite

2009 Top 10 Ubuntu Downloads

First, make sure the needed perl packages are installed:

sudo apt-get install perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl libmd5-perl

$ wget http://www.webmin.com/download/deb/webmin-current.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i webmin_1.490_all.deb

Or whatever .deb file you just downloaded. Then browse to https://servername:10000/ on your desktop Firefox. Firefox probably won’t like the untrusted certificate, but you can trust the exception here.

ServerName homeserver

to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. Then, in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default, change DocumentRoot to

/home/www

and added to the bottom,

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerName homeserver
 ServerAlias lightbulbbooks.dev *.lightbulbbooks.dev lbb.dev *.lbb.dev
 DocumentRoot /home/www/lightbulbbooks.dev
</VirtualHost>

Now

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Make sure the /etc/hosts file on all the intranet clients contains something like

# The following are for web site aliases
10.0.0.10       www.llb.dev llb.dev
10.0.0.10       www.lightbulbbooks.dev lightbulbbooks.dev

I could then browse to my virtual domains from the network clients.

Before installing on the server, though you need to install the java runtime environment (JRE) and SWT.

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-fonts libswt-gtk-3.4-java xauth

Now just follow the instructions on CrashPlan’s support site here and here, although for the latter, I don’t use the ssh port forwarding since I’d rather run the GUI directly from the server via ssh tunneling. So in essence, CrashPlan has to only be installed on the server–the GUI can be run from the desktop through ssh.

Then establish a tunnel between the desktop and the server

$ ssh -p ?? josh@homeserver

where ?? is the ssh port you set up on the server. Then run

josh@homeserver$ CrashPlanDesktop

or

josh@homeserver$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/crashplan/bin/CrashPlanDesktop /usr/local/bin/crashplan
josh@homeserver$ crashplan

Once crashplan is running, setup is in the bag. The configuration I’m going for is to backup (locally) to an external hard drive attached to the server and (remotely) to a hard drive on a relative’s home network in another state. That way, come disk crash, burglar or fire, I can still get my data (and life) back.

Also, I’ve found out that the kernal doesn’t always mount the usb backup drive to the same spot every time. But, it’s not too hard to setup a udev rule to settle that.

First, find out what the drive is called. With the usb drive connected, but not mounted, run

$ sudo blkid

and copy UUID or LABEL. Make the following entry in /etc/fstab:

# External USB backup drive      
LABEL=backup    /backup         ext4    defaults        0       0

Here’s a nice, information excerpt from linuxquestions thread: “If you use UUID they get lost when you mkfs, if you use LABEL you have to assign the labels by hand after a mkfs, and if you use ID you could have device “conflicts” if you have two identical drives – but this would happen with the udev hack too.”

Here’s the first part of /etc/cups/cupsd.conf:

# Log general information in error_log - change "warn" to "debug"
# for troubleshooting...
LogLevel warn
# Deactivate CUPS' internal logrotating, as we provide a better one, especially
# LogLevel debug2 gets usable now
MaxLogSize 0
# Administrator user group...
SystemGroup lpadmin
# Only listen for connections from the local machine.
Listen *:631
#Listen localhost:631
Listen /var/run/cups/cups.sock
# Show shared printers on the local network.
Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
BrowseAllow all
BrowseLocalProtocols CUPS dnssd
BrowseAddress @LOCAL

# Default authentication type, when authentication is required...
DefaultAuthType Basic

# Restrict access to the server...
<Location />
#  Order allow,deny
 Order deny,allow
 Deny from all
 Allow localhost
 Allow @LOCAL
</Location>

# Restrict access to the admin pages...
<Location /admin>
 Order allow,deny
Allow @LOCAL
</Location>

# Restrict access to configuration files...
<Location /admin/conf>
 AuthType Default
 Require user @SYSTEM
 Order allow,deny
 Allow @LOCAL
</Location>

# Set the default printer/job policies...
...
...

After restarting the CUPS server

sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart

you can browse to the server administration pages at

http://homeserver:631/

After connecting our Canon Pixma MP780 via USB into the server, I ran

josh@homeserver:/$ lpinfo -v
network lpd
network socket
network smb
network http
network ipp
network beh
direct scsi
network dnssd://Canon%20MP780%20%40%20hannahscomp._ipp._tcp.local/cups
network dnssd://Canon,%20Inc.%20PIXMA%20MP780%20Scanner%20%40%20hannahscomp._ipp._tcp.local/cups
network dnssd://Metafile%20to%20EPS%20Converter%20%40%20hannahscomp._ipp._tcp.local/cups
direct hp
direct usb://Canon/MP780
direct usb://Canon/MP780%20FAX
direct hpfax

Then, to find the right driver,

josh@homeserver:$ lpinfo -m | grep 'Canon PIXMA MP780'
gutenprint.5.2://bjc-MULTIPASS-MP780/expert Canon PIXMA MP780 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.4

The problem now is that I can’t see the printer from any other computer on the network through the cups service. I had to set up a samba share to print, which worked for a while then I think I broke it eventually. I found a better way to get it to work, avoiding samba altogether. On the clients, install a network printer via Internet Printing Protocol (ipp). The IPP Printer URI syntax is:

ipp://homeserver/printers/Canon_MP780
(Host: homeserver/printers/
Queue: Canon_MP780)

The device name, Canon_MP780, should be whatever cups sees the device name installed as on the server. Leave the queue blank. I still can’t see the shared printer via the cups protocol, which would be much more convenient, but this works OK for now.

I found an interesting link on setting up a LDAP print server here, with summary here, but haven’t tried it out yet.

Scanning

Follow along https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ScanningHowTo

With one caveat (bug) that I ran into. Apparently, the local scanner port needs write permissions–not given by default. The fix I found is described here, and consists of the following. But first, run a few diagnostic tools:

sane-find-scanner
$ scanimage -V
$ scanimage -L
$ scanimage -T

This is where it broke, saying “scanimage: open of device pixma:04A91707 failed: Access to resource has been denied”. The problem is evident when you look at permissions on your usb port.

$ ll /dev/bus/usb/001/003 (or where ever scanimage -T told you to look)
crw-rw-r-- 1 root root 189, 2 2009-12-04 22:04 003

As a work around, edit

$ sudo nano /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules

Change the libusb line to read:

# libusb device nodes
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0666"

Then just unplug, and replug in the scanner, and run

$ scanimage -T

Client configuration

Finally, in order for your clients to find the server, goto /etc/sane.d/net.conf and add the line

homeserver

Then, to keep sane from listing digital cameras in the scanner list at start up, edit /etc/sane.d/v4l.conf thus:

#
# In order to use the v4linux backend you have to give the device
# You can enable multiple lines if
# you really have multible v4l devices.
#
/dev/bttv0
# To keep sane from listing digital camera in scanner list
#/dev/video0
/dev/video1
/dev/video2
/dev/video3