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Old Agfa Snapscan on Ubuntu 9.10.

This morning I tried to use may very old and almost antique scanner Agfa Snapscan e20 with my brand new Ubuntu 9.10 and xsane.

Surprise, surprise, it did not work. So, I started searching for a solution on Google, read myself through many boards and finally constructed this solution from all I read (and thought myself, of course *g*):

1. First of all you need the proprietary Windows driver of your Snapscan device. This can be found here.

2. The downloaded ZIP archive will contain a file called 2.0.0.9-e20.exe. You will need to extract all files from that exe to get a file called snap20.bin. But how do you do that? The file is not a self extracting ZIP archive. So, unzip does not work. In this case wine is your friend:

sudo apt-get install wine

Open the exe file with wine. Leave the initial screen open but do not follow the installation routine further on. Instead, copy the needed file from the temp directory of wine:

sudo cp ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/temp/Drivers/snap20.bin /etc/sane.d/

Now, close the installer.

3. Now edit the configuration file /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf and add (or modify if present) that line:

firmware /etc/sane.d/snape20.bin

4. Start xsane and start scanning

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Ubuntu 9.10 64bit vs. Broadcom

Well, I actually didn’t think about my WIFI-chipset when I bought my Dell Studio notebook: If Dell offers Ubuntu as an operating system along their products anyway, there should not be a driver problem when manually installing Ubuntu. After installing 8.04 and later 8.10 and 9.04 (32bit by accident), it worked out of the box: The Broadcom driver for the BCM4312 chipset was proprietary and I didn’t have a single problem.

Yesterday I decided to get rid of the 32 bit 9.04 version and install the Ubuntu 9.10 beta version. Installation worked fine, but after rebooting the system I saw that there was no wireless network connection at all. Running lsmod told me that the b43 module is running. However, it didn’t work: no network connection was shown, not even that it recognized my WIFI card.

After reading through several blogs and forums I finally got it running. This installation guideline might help you, too. Maybe the driver will be included / fixed in the final 9.10 version, but just in case it’s not, this might be a solution for you:

1. Compile Broadcom driver

Download the driver from the official Broadcom website and follow the installation instructions in the README.txt.

After compiling the module and adding it via “modprobe” as described in the README.txt file, it already worked fine for me: The system connected to my local WIFI access point.

2. Load driver on startup

What didn’t work was the automatic disabling of the ssb module by adding it to the blacklist. The command lsmod still showed that the module was loaded even though it was added to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. Therefore, after a reboot of the system I still had no connection at all and had to manually modprobe wl again. Adding “wl” to the list in /etc/modules showed no effect.

Here is the solution I found on another forum (don’t find the URL anymore):

Add these 3 lines to /etc/rc.local:

rmmod ssb
modprobe -r ssb
modprobe wl

After a reboot, the network service now automatically took the newly installed driver.

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Flashvideos mit ffmpeg

Wenn man -wie ich- Linux-User ist und Videoschnitt machen möchte, stößt man relativ schnell an seine Grenzen. Bisher ist mir noch kein Tool untergekommen, mit dem man professionel arbeiten könnte. Deshalb lasse ich es auch meistens bleiben 🙂

Allerdings hatte ich neulich für einen Kunden das Problem, einen DVD-Ausschnitt auf seiner Website als Video zur Verfügung stellen zu müssen. Eine Konvertierung als AVI der MPEG kam nicht in Frage, es sollte also ein Flashvideo werden.

Begeistert bin ich schon eine Weile von ffmpeg- irgendwie hat es mir immer aus der Patsche geholfen- sei es bei der einfachen Mischung von MP3 und Videodaten, der Konvertierung von avi in DVD oder ähnlichem.

Dennoch war ich überrascht, dass man mit diesem kleinen Helfer auch sehr fein Flasmovies herstellen kann. Zumindest war ich überrascht, dass dies ohne komplizierte Parameter möglich ist.

Und so gehts:

ffmpeg -i meineVideodatei [-i meineSounddatei] -ar 44100 meineOutputdatei.flv

Überrascht? So einfach ist es 🙂

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Skype 2 beta und Fedora 8

Seit November bietet Skype eine Version 2, welche als Beta vorliegt und Linuxusern endlich die versprochene Video-Call-Unterstützung liefert.

Ich als Fedora-User dachte mir, probieren wir das doch gleich mal aus. Also: Version 1.4 runtergeschmissen und 2. X draufgemacht. Doch schon beim ersten Start kam die Ernüchterung: Der Sound ist futsch.

Nach einer Suche in diversen Foren fand ich heraus, dass das am fehlenden Support für Pulseaudio von Skype liegt.

Für alle, die ähnliche Probleme haben (ich glaube Ubuntu 8 hat ebenfalls Pulseaudio per default integriert) gibt es ein Workaround, welches hier zu finden ist.