Linux bits and pieces

This page collects various things that took me a while to figure out in Linux, so it serves both as my personal memory backup and a searchable resource for others to save you some work.

CUPS: SMB woes

2009-03-17
Since we have rather fascist network admins at work who firewalled off the new super duper department printer and allowed access only via some Windoze box, I had to finally set up CUPS to use SMB printing. As if URLs of the form smb://WINDOWSDOMAIN%5Cuser:password@/server.dns.domain/printername weren't enough punishment already, CUPS has more in stock: printing from the commandline using lpworked fine once I got the URL right but apart from OpenOffice hardly any other application got it right. You get to see all the right printer options from the PPD but the actual printing fails with some usually very nondescript message such as "Too many failed attempts". Turns out authentication doesn't work. As this is pretty much a single user machine anyway (and printing through a single account anyway), the cheapest fix is to replace whatever is after AuthInfoRequired in your /etc/cups/printers.conf with "none". Sigh.

USB: connect-debounce failed, port disabled

2008-12-27
A lesson I have to re-learn every now and then: Do not change your kernel options needlessly!
I had been plagued by tons of messages like the above in my kernel log and consequently dysfunctional USB devices for a few days. Apparently this has been reported and rereported as a kernel bug in a lot of places since Linux 2.6.16, mostly for laptop chipsets. My problem wasn't as bad though: switching off USB_SUSPEND (“USB selective suspend/resume and wakeup”) fixed it. Well, it sounded like a good idea when I came across this option …

Slow graphics under X.org with Intel chipset

2008-10-30
At work I use Debian Lenny on an Intel 82Q963/Q965 graphics controller. Since they started using the intel driver instead of i810, graphics operations and particularly scrolling in terminals were painfully slow and CPU-intensive. As I found out, this can be fixed with a single Device option that enables some sort of “legacy XFree86 acceleration method”, whatever that is:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

Great :-/

Trackman Marble FX in X.org 7.x

2006-07-05
Gentoo has stabilized X.org 7.0/7.1, so after the laptop that has always required it for its i915 graphics, I'm upgrading the desktop as well. Following the migration guide, all goes well, only my Logitech Trackman Marble FX ends up with two middle buttons. A little more editing of xorg.conf has it working nicely again: both horizontal and vertical panning in GTK applications plus vertical scrolling using the scroll button:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse1"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "Device"      "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Name" "TrackMan Marble FX"
        Option          "Vendor" "Logitech"
        Option          "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
        Option          "AngleOffset" "10"
        Option          "Buttons" "5"
        Option          "EmulateWheel" "true"
        Option          "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
        Option          "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
        Option          "EmulateWheelInertia" "8"
EndSection

I found that adding an

        Option          "XAxisMapping" "6 7"

(which I thought would give me free 2D scrolling) doesn't quite send the right events but causes some annoying jumping back and forth in most web browsers and does nothing in most other software. Too bad.

Last change: 17-Mar-2009, 22:58