I’ve recently purchased an Epson Stylus Photo PX830FWD which doesn’t seem to want to stop impressing me. Following the death of my last desktop PC, I needed a way to be able to scan again since there’s no way I’d ever be able to use my SCSI scanner. Wireless was the way to go as our lives are surrounded by laptops, tablets and smartphones not to mention the whole internet. Yes, this is a Google Cloud Print enabled printer which means I can print to it from my Android devices, or from Chrome, etc… wherever I am in the world. Epson have their own cloud print service if you prefer, but I haven’t tested it yet.

I was very happy to learn that I can use this device wirelessly from my Fedora machines as well since booting Windows just to scan wirelessly was not something that I was looking forward to have to do. If you do use Windows, the Scan-to-PC feature is pretty cool. It means that you can scan a bunch of documents at the scanner without touching a PC. I stuck Windows inside a VirtualBox guest, mounted a folder on my Synology NAS and scan to that directly. This way my scans are immediately accessible on my local network, remotely via scp/sshfs and even via the NAS’ web interface.

I haven’t tested the fax capabilities yet, but over and above manual mode there is a Print-to-Fax driver under Windows with it’s own address book. And if you ever run out of ruled or graph paper, stick a blank A4 sheet in it, press a button and hey presto. Stick in an SD card with pictures and it will even use a photo as a background. The 32GB Transcend Class 10 SDHC which I bought for my Canon EOS 550D Rebel T2i worked no problem with the printer.

I no longer have a need to print on CDs or DVDs myself, but it has it’s own built-in tray which sounds like a Transformer transforming as it moves around the internal parts of the printer during eject/insert. All in all, an excellent piece of kit which I would recommend any day. Now I need a good shredder (minimum DIN/Level 3). Any recommendations?

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Let’s fix it. Click your username in the top right of the screen and select System Settings.

Under  Hardware click Keyboard.

Switch to the Shortcuts tab, and click Navigation in the left column. Scroll down and select Hide all normal windows which has a default value of Disabled.

Set the shortcut to whatever you want.

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3. Wireless LAN for Runlevel 3 in Fedora Core 12

For instance (depending on your distro), instead of:

su -c ‘yum localinstall –nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm’

Use:

su -c ‘yum localinstall –nogpgcheck http://download2.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download2.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm’

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1. Wireless LAN for Runlevel 3 in Fedora Core 12
2. Quick keyboard shortcut tip for the EURO € symbol.
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I have finally found a solution to get these buttons back and if you are looking for a solution, this should work for you too:

• $ sudo yum -y install gnome-tweak-tool
• $ gnome-tweak-tool
• Click on Shell
• Change Arrangement of buttons on the title bar from Close only to All
• Log out or Restart
• Log in
• Enjoy!

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1. Fedora GNOME 3 show desktop keyboard shortcut.
2. How to install KDE on Fedora Core 13 and onwards.
3. Installing Fedora Core 12 (FC12 “Constantine”) on old hardware.

I see that some folks over on FedoraForum.org are struggling with this. Hopefully this guide will help those who, like me, need a wireless connection from runlevel 3.

If you are not in runlevel 5 already, run “startx” in your command line to get to your GUI. You do not need to do this as root but you *will* need root access further down. Right click on the Network Manager icon and select “Edit Connections…”

On the Network Connections dialog which appears, switch to the Wireless tab, select the wireless connection that you wish to have available in your runlevel 3, then click “Edit…”. If your wireless network is not set up at this point, you will need to Add it first.

Once you provide the root password, you’ll be presented with the properties of the connection. Here, make sure you place a tick in the “Connect automatically” and “Available to all users” check boxes, then click “Apply…”

Reboot and your wireless should connect at runlevel 3. Let me know if this has or hasn’t worked for you and if there’s anyone who has managed to get this behavior from just the command line, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Related posts:

1. Installing Fedora Core 12 (FC12 “Constantine”) on old hardware.
2. How to install KDE on Fedora Core 13 and onwards.
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I think that this is what FC12 was trying to tell me by flashing a very brief message along the lines of “You do not have enough RAM to run the graphical installer.” whilst trying to do a clean install on an old P3 800Mhz machine (a quick search confirms that I’m not the first to get this). It subsequently kicks into text mode installer, gets your keyboard, partitioning, root password and timezone settings, then goes off and installs exactly 200 packages without even asking you what you want to install.

When it is done doing that, it reboots into runlevel 3 (console) and you get no GUI as you would expect. Obviously with only 200 packages installed, I doubted that any GUI would have been installed anyway and sure enough, startx confirmed that. yum to the rescue? Not quite!

I quickly discovered that I had no working network connection. ifconfig gave me only the loopback (lo) interface and a brief query told me that I had no networking packages installed at all. So I pop in the DVD and mount it, go into the Packages folder and start installing RPMs hoping to get networking working. Eventually, I got stuck in an endless loop of depsolving errors and gave up. The main culprit IIRC was libpolkit-gobject.

I momentarily give up and decide that I have no choice but to reinstall FC11, which turns out to be the solution to my problem. So here is what I did (exactly so I don’t know if variants would work).

1. Clean install of FC11 (I used the LiveCD for a quick/minimal install)
2. Changed the runlevel from 5 to 3 in /etc/inittab and rebooted
3. yum install preugrade
4. preupgrade-cli “Fedora 12 (Constantine)”
5. reboot

All commands above ran as root. This put me into a text mode installer for FC12 which installed 1107 packages after which it automatically reboots as I found the machine waiting at the login prompt. So I log in, change back /etc/inittab from 3 to 5 and reboot once again.

I now have FC12 running as expected.

Related posts:

1. How to install KDE on Fedora Core 13 and onwards.
2. Wireless LAN for Runlevel 3 in Fedora Core 12
3. Fedora GNOME 3 show desktop keyboard shortcut.