hahah what a great fun:
imagine an old Matrix printer connected to your Raspberry Pi, printing out tweets for you instantly...



Sounds easy? well, not _that_ easy...
First of all I connected my RPi to the old Citizen 120D Matrix printer, finding out that the micro computer does not recognize it as printer. bummer...
A quick search told me that its a missing module named usblp.ko. And the worst thing is: you need to crosscompile your kernel in order to get this Module
I followed the instructions on elinux: http://elinux.org/Rpi_kernel_compilation. It took the whole evening to download all tools, kerneal sources and to compile the thing.

ok ... Today, very early i got to install and boot the kernel and the module and tried to run the TwitterMatrixTicker script i found ( http://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2012/0 ... tweet.html ) to output the twittersearch for my login direct on the printer.
guess: not working: the device /dev/usb/lp0 needs to be chmodded
so i did sudo chmod 666 /dev/usb/lp0 and .....
tadaaaa ... a first hello appeared after echo hello >/dev/usb/lp0

thats it...

now i can use it in my showcase in Frankfurt to attract people ;)


p.s. I have problems initializing the printer. the USB-Parallel port device is messing around with the old printer on startup. to use it, disconnect it, send a file to the printer, connect it and then its working...

now c'mon and twitter to @masterhit

sadly the weather is not mindblowing, so i still have some spare time to tinker a bit with my toys.
a cheap nikon here in my office shall be used with gphoto2 to make a timelapse film.
all my linux pcs are @home, so i needed a windows port of gphoto2 (it's a remote control tool for nearly any digital camera)

my first guess was just to install cygwin and have a package called gphoto, but ... möööööp ... no.
so back to basic: i learned how to compile stuff on my own sind sshd on my 486 ;)
unimaginable boatloads of dependencies are waiting for you if you try to compile gphoto2, but i made it.
sadly libusb-win32 didn't initialize my camera, but some guys already had this probblem:

Download the latest binary version of libusb-win32 from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb-win32/, unzip it somewhere, and run ./bin/inf-wizard.exe, select your camera and when you're finished click the "Install" button.

this worked, and i even found a precompiled (older) version of gphoto... so if you di not want to go to alllll the way through the compile sh** just take a closer lokok on this site:
https://code.google.com/p/scan-manager/downloads/detail?name=gphoto-2.4.14-win32-build2.zip&can=2&q=


and finally i am able to remotely control my camera with a windows pc..

yeah!

I've been playing with Linux since 1995 and in the very beginning it was a pain in the ass for me and my friends to use it properly and productive. The missing drivers were the main problem. no matter if you were using an isdn card or a scanner, you coulnd't find, compile or write your own drivers. Hardware vendors did their best to keep it this way. There has been no support, no drivers or anything else for any system except windows. I do not want to discuss the reasons here, but as the headline states: exactly this is now the best part of Linux.

Timewarp. 2013. some examples:
I have a cheap Nikon Camera, plug it into my linux desktop and bing, am able to control it completely with my gphoto program, take photos, download them on the computer, compile timelaps films, etc.
Or my scanner, an Canon scansomething. plug and scan. The program "sane" just uses it as any other newer scanner.
My HP Laserjet: just plug it in, use a common pcl driver and CUPS, and print, even in duplex mode.
There are so many examples on how easy Linux is to be used nowadays. No driver CD's needed. Just simply use the tools.

Thew Hardware support is so extreme good because of the need to build common interfaces with little device specific code at the backend. You do not need to install a bloated 40 megabyte diver suite for your scanner, with unusable software , which will probably never be updated again or a 54 megabyte printer driver for just showing you the status of the toner cart...

I hear people talking about a problem in the linux desktop market, but in my view windows has the problem. Drivers refuse to work in newer win versions, older programs refuse to, also. The user interface has been made unusable, even worse is the most used program "word". O M G - completely totally unusable. terrifying

This whole situation, combined with easy to install and use distributions like Fuduntu blow away all doubts: Linux will dominate the whole pc market in a couple of years, not only the servers.


Have fun playing with fuduntu!

p.s. yes, apple os is indeed usable, stable, good looking and very good in hardware support (due to the lack of hardware :P ) but not affordable to everyone.
p.p.s and yes, playing really new games is only possible on windows .... YET... http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/ ... 04151.html

finally, to prove my claim some screenshots:
my desktop showing Xsane

and a scanned random pc of paper...


my camera as detected by gphoto (via console)

In der rpi gruppe auf google+ las ich von der möglichkeit eine kamera über das usb kabel auszulösen.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117098976115661643090/posts/X8d3HNv1vAe
der autor installierte zusätzlich ein lcd display um die kamera komplett ohne monitor betrreiben zu können.

aber das wirklich interessante daran war für mich die existenz der software gphoto2,
welche als trigger eingesetzt wird. unterstützt werden 1500 digitalkameras, und obwohl meine nicht auf der liste der unterstützten steht, funktioniert sie trotzdem
\o/
mit ffmpeg werden die einzelbilder dann zu einem filmchen zusammengesetzt.
ich freu mich auf den sommer, wenn ich mit der 70€ digicam nikon coolpix ein timelaps video posten kann

geilomat!
webdoktor

Climm is the command line multi messenger.
available on http://www.climm.org
to get it run under the raspbian wheezy distro you need to compile a boatload of packets, as the distro doesnt deliver nearly no needed dependencies:

climm requieres gnutls and tcl (a compiled version, the raspbian tcl package seems to be borked)
gnutls needs to be an outdated version! (i tried 2 days with vers. 3.1.5... 2.8 is working ;) )
gnutls depends on gmp, libgcrypt and nettle
libgcrypt requires libgpg-error and so on,
a few other dependencies have been solved with sudo apt-get install blablabla....


and now: