HP Deskjet F380 Problems

Situation: HP F380 attached locally via USB to a Debian Etch machine with HPLIP for printing

Problem: Printing does not start due to "Device communication error" 5012 OR it prints an empty page!

Solution: Add the current user to the group lp with adduser USER lp

Idea taken from: Error 5012

Windows Activation (sucks ass)

Setup: Windows XP SP2 fresh install
Problem: During Internet activation: Windows activation cannot be completed at this time.
Solution: Download and seperately install Windows XP SP 3

Tele2 Complete (Student) bandwidth problem

Problem: Internet from Tele2 with Complete Student product and a vood Router working in a setup bridged mode. Somehow bandwidth seems capped at 20-30 KBps.

Reason: They seem to have changed the lines for VOIP and Internet

Solution: At the router switch to the other channel (pppoe2 instead of pppoe1) for bridged PPPoE.

Vista immediately rebooting at startup

Reason: USB-Stick plugged in
Solution: Boot without it

Cygwin Emacs

Problem: Using Cygwin under Windows Vista with emacs inside and C-x C-c is not working, because it is somehow mapped to C-x C-g

Reason: Unknown

Solution: Add 'export CYGWIN=binmode ntsec tty' to .bashrc in the home directory.

See: http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.help/browse_frm/thread/a180845843d43295?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&rnum=5&prev=/groups%3Fas_q%3D%27C-x%2520C-g%27%26safe%3Dimages%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26as_ugroup%3D*emacs*%26lr%3D%26as_scoring%3Dd%26hl%3Den

Emacs: XML Syntax highlighting / Font-lock-mode not working

Problem: When editing XML Files in emacs on Debian, it won't do any syntax highlighting (named font-lock-mode in emacs) for anything in the file

Reason: psgml Package installed, which is a emacs SGML major mode that kicks in when editing XML Files (as XML is a subset of SGML iirc) instead of the normal XML-mode and doesn't seem to have syntax highlighting.

Solution: Remove the psgml package: aptitude remove psgml to get back normal XML mode

LaTeX and graphics

Situation: Using latex with the graphicx package and the includegraphics command to include a png Image

Problem:
! LaTeX Error: Cannot determine size of graphic in Hysteresis_sharp_curve.png (

no BoundingBox).


Solution: Well, pdflatex doesn't complain, so I think the package only works with pdflatex

ispell with ngerman and Umlaute öäü

Problem: My ispell with ngerman package recognizes words with an Umlaut like hinüber as two words hin and ber and doesn't even sense the Umlaut

Solution: Check the coding system of the checked file. Ngerman Ispell should work on Files with ISO-8859-15 encoding. (Emacs Command: C-x RET r or M-x revert-buffer-with-coding-system to change the current buffers encoding)

Thanks to: Gentoo Forums

CIFS/SMB mount problem on Debian

Situation:

//10.0.0.1/share /mnt/sharemount cifs rw,noexec,nosuid,password=,username=someusername,nodev

in my /etc/fstab for mounting a CIFS network share.

Problem When trying to mount (with mount command)
Command lines output:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //10.0.0.1/share,

missing codepage or helper program, or other error

(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might

need a /sbin/mount. helper program)

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg | tail or so

dmesg output:

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

Reason:Seems like its missing the mount.cifs script/binary or somethine else that comes with the smbfs package.

Solution:

aptitude install smbfs

This installs mount.cifs and probably more. It resolved it in my case.

appletviewer does nothing / exits immediately

Problem: When calling appletviewer file.html it exits immediately, does nothing, outputs nothing

Solution: Use verbose applet tag format:

< applet param=value > < /applet>

instead of

< applet param=value />

.

Furthermore this format doesn't even work with XHTML.

LaTeX tabular

Problem:

! Missing # inserted in alignment preamble.

during LaTeX document compilation.

Reason: Missing alignment fields in a tabular environment:

before: \begin{tabular}{|||}
after: \begin{tabular}{|c|c|}

Auto luksOpen and lvm mounting

It won't ask for the LUKS passphrase during startup and have some problems with mounting the LVM volumes afterwards correctly, though I had setup /etc/crypttab correctly.

Adding this:

/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/cryptroot:
target=LUKSVOLUME,source=/dev/sda2,lvm=MYVOLGROUP-ROOT

with the correct UPPERCASE values and copying those scripts:

cp /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot
cp /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptroot /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptroot

and regenerating the initramfs with update-initramfs did the thing finally!

So my LVM on top of luks is now working on the laptop too, yeeha.

Thanks to this guide.