You might or might not like the new Oce multifunctional printers the Informatikdienst HSLU installed everywhere on the campus. Many cool features like scanning a file and get it sent to you directly as a pdf via email are cool functions. Not so cool (for our beloved trees) is that everytime you print a page (or more than one) a banner page appears showing your login/date/time etc.

You can (and should) turn this off. In UNIX it was under printer settings and then printer options “Banner page” -> “Off”. In the ppd file (/etc/cups/ppd/printername.ppd) this would be:

*DefaultJCLOCBannerPage: No

I’m quite sure you can turn this of in Windows and MAC OS quiete similar. It would be even more helpful if IT Services sets the standard driver configuration not to print the banner page. For our environment. And for our trees

UPDATE: I just got an email from Christoph Stutz workig for IT Services. He told me that unfortunately there’s no standard setting  for removing the banner page. But he also pointed out how the problem is solved by using the right driver. I felt free to print his text here and didn’t translate it into english:

zu den "banner-pages":
windows-mässig auf unserem print-server und auf dem drucker selber sind alle
"banner-prints" deaktiviert.

der linux-treiber scheint standardmässig mit "banner-print" "enable"
ausgestattet zu sein..das kann ich aber selber auch nicht steuern...das
müssen linux-anwender selber richtig konfigurieren..wie sie das in ihrem
blog schon sehr gut beschrieben haben.

leider gibt kein generelles setting auf dem drucker, der das
"banner-drucken" von allen OS verhindert. verwendet man aber den richtigen
treiber oder konfiguriert ihn richtig, kommen auch keine banner raus.
dabei ist es aber wichtig dass Mac-user den druckertreiber von unserer
webseite: http://hotline.hslu und linux-user von dieser website:

http://www.konicaminolta.eu/business-solutions/support/copier-print-systems.

html beziehen und installieren - bei diesen sollte das "default" ohne
banner-druck sein..bei den Mac's mit sicherheit.. bei linux "ohne gewähr". 

ich hoffe dass ich mit diesem mail einen kleinen oekologischen beitrag
leisten konnte.

Thank you Christoph. And I aswell hope that we could now save some trees

Elon had to shut down the Osiris webserver. The HTAgil documentation can now be found under HTAgil

Hello Together

We used a lot of proprietary CAS tools during our studies. There was Maple, Mathematica, Matlab and so on.
I just found out that there’s an open source CAS program. It’s called SAGE and you can get it on http://www.sagemath.org/download.html .

In Windows you would need VMware player, which is also free.

Give it a try

I recently came across a problem when trying to uninstall a package with pkgrm on OpenSolaris. The Error was something like:

… ## Removing installed package instance <SUNWatheros>
pkgrm: ERROR: CLASSES parameter undefined in…

You can solve this problem by using pkg (IPS) instead of pkgrm. The command would be:

pkg uninstall <packagename>

As of today I suddenly wasn’t able to connect to MSN anymore with Pidgin under my Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid). After googling I found, that msnp14 doesn’t seem to work anymore and one has to switch to msnp15 which is included with the package msn-pecan. So here’s how this works on Ubuntu 8.10:

- Stop all Pidgin instances
- Go to your favourite package manager (I use command line apt-get) and install msn-pecan
- apt-get install msn-pecan
- start pidgin and go to the account settings for your MSN account. Set the protocol from “MSN” to “WLM”

After those steps, msn should work again with pidgin.
I also strongly recommend to frequently change your MSN passwords! In the last few weeks I get more and more SPAM messages from friends which I have in my MSN list. I guess their passwords leaked somehow and some nasty script is spamming me through their accounts.

Use this address to change your MSN password: https://account.live.com/

Cheers and have a nice week

Get your free copy today!

http://www.opensolaris.com/

See also this video with the top 5 reasons to use OS:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1640183659/bctid1799151537

The new Netbeans Version 6.5 is available for download now:

http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html

NetBeans IDE 6.5 offers simplified and rapid development of web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with PHP, JavaScript, Java, C/C++, Ruby, and Groovy. Here’s a summary of the new features in NB 6.5:

* Robust support for PHP and JavaScript
* Debugging for Firefox and IE
* Support for Groovy and Grails
* New enhancements for Java™, Ruby and Rails, and C/C++ development
* Built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save

If you’re new to NetBeans, you’ll also appreciate the IDE editing capabilities and the famous Swing GUI Builder (Matisse).

Today we finally took down the old iServer. With a little smile on our face and a little teardrop in our eyes, we take farewell from our good old friend.

root@iserver / # shutdown -h now “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”

Broadcast message from root (pts/1) (Thu Oct  9 17:02:00 2008):

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
The system is going down for system halt NOW!

We will always keep you in good memory.

PS: If anybody had data on the iServer which he didn’t backup so far, I have a USB drive with all the data on it.

Hello

I’m proud to announce, that it is now possible to create your public_html to be displayed on the web.
It’s really easy to get it work:
Just create a directory named public_html in your home directory on enterpriselab. There you can put your web page (html, php possible). Your page should now be accessible through:

http://user.enterpriselab.ch/~<yourusername>

If you encounter any problems, feel free to contact me.

Hi folks!

There’s now the possibility to activate a Spam Plugin for your blog(s) if you encounter problems with comment spam.
Please see our wiki for more information.