[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday 21 January 2019

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     I showed Jim that his machine worked from
> the Ubuntu 18.04.1 USB Flash Drive I had made
> for him after the last meeting with a faster boot
>  and a working WiFi.
>     Since the meeting I have mailed him a
> copy of the manual for this machine and
> a URL for the problem that may give
> useful advice.  He can connect at home via
> Ethernet wired connection.

Once again, quick thinking and generous help!

Basically, it's been shown conclusively that there's nothing wrong with
Jim's laptop hardware.  Moreover, everyone including Jim should have
been  clear on this point by, at latest, your posting of January 8th
where you reminded Jim that everything had been fine when he'd booted 
your Ubuntu Studio live distro.  Yet, here we are 1/2 month later, and
Jim hasn't acted.

Jim:  Time to fish or cut bait.

Decide how much of a time budget (two hours?  three hours?) of serious 
diagnosis you're willing to put into repairing whatever you somehow
broke on your existing installation.  Spend that time, and see if you can 
find and fix your boo-boo.  (No, I urge that you stop thinking it
credible to suppose that things just 'broke'.  This is wildly
improbable.)  

If you can't, then update your data backups -- you have complete, tested
backups of your data files, right?  right?  -- and then blow away
everything during a fresh installation.

You _do_ have handy the means to reinstall and are comfortable with
using that, right?  If not, fix that, first.

>     Now a 3rd problem for your delectation as
> last week it seems the printer driver for my
> consumer Epson 515NX has disappeared from
> CUPS recently.

1.  The Epson Stylus NX515 (note: correct model name) has been out of
production for about nine years.

2.  All-in-one printers have always had a pretty dreadful reputation for
quality, hence it's unlikely the coders of printer driver software would
own them, hence little motivation to create and maintain quality
drivers.  This is doubly so for an inkjet-based all-in-one printer
with inkjets' ruinously expensive supply costs.  (We've talked about tis
before.  You said you use it because you don't have much money.  I
replied that practically any non-inkjet option would cost you less
money.)

3.  That having been said, looks to me like the current Gutenprint (v.
5.2.15) release still includes the escp2-nx515 driver, which is what is
reported to be the best choice for your thing:
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php

So, I'm confused about what 'has disappeared from CUPS recently' 
means.  Do you have the gutenprint package installed, or not?  What
printer driver did you use to use (i.e., what does 'the printer driver
for my consumer Epson 515NX' mean specifically)?