A lot going on in Ubuntu-land

I just ran the Ubuntu update for the day. A new release of the kernel and another new version of Firefox.

Frankly, I've moved to Google Chrome, since Ubuntu seemed to be getting slower and slower. I've not had that complaint with Chrome, though I did add the FlashBlock extension which prevents a lot of unnecessary advertising from chewing up CPU in the background.

As for the Kernel, there are some fixes to the ext4 file system I committed to when I installed Lucid, and the ecryptfs encryption module that I have decided might be a safe bet for encrypting my personal, business and backup data. The challenge now is to see if I can recompile the ecryptfs module on the Rackspace cloud server I've been using. I did it once, now let's see if I can do it again.

Oh and if you've been reading this block in the past, you'll see that I've been struggling with OpenOffice crashing. It still does, regularly if a document is showing a graphic on a page when I swap between applications. Not nice, as some of the documents I've been doing are pretty graphic intensive. I will continue to try and resolve this...

Canon PIXMA MX700 - print and scanning with Ubuntu

I own the nice-enough little all-in-one printer, scanner, fax unit, the Canon MX700. It was cheap, and I desperately needed a scanner at short notice. It worked nicely with my wife's WinXP laptop, but I've always struggled with it on Linux. An upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) left me without a working printer again.

So here I go: when you set up your new printer, you won't find the MX700 in the list. You won't find an MX anything in fact. So pick the Canon PIXMA MP520. This apparently was released the same time and probably apart from network printing options or something benign, offers the same printing firmware. At least with USB, this works nicely for me.

As for scanning, I previously had to mess around to get SANE to understand the device. But then I ran across this: the SANE backend that is the standard scanning support for Linux claims to support the MX700: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html#Z-CANON

PIXMA MX700

USB Ethernet

0x04a9/0x1729

Complete

Flatbed and ADF scan. All resolutions supported (up to 2400DPI)

pixma (0.16.1)

sane-pixma

Well, I just tried it with my favorite app, gscan2pdf and it just worked.

Finally, this stuff seems to be coming together nicely. Great work SANE team...