My laptop broke recently. It’s a pain for several reasons. Joseph lent me a laptop which has an excellent collection of stickers on it. It is, furthermore, a high specification laptop with a fast processor and plenty of RAM. It runs GNOME. However, it does not have a working battery: the battery does not store power. Prior to this, I was using another laptop which was made in 2007. It also hasn’t got any battery. I would like to try and find an analogy between this trio of computers and SI#23. To some extent because working with a collection of Linux machines has shaped my experience of the trimester technologically.

The Hard drive as seam/quilt

Over the past month I have written documents on several different computers, all of which are Linux systems running Debian or Debian derivatives. I need to find a way to consolidate my workflow because my files are all over the place. I have various pieces of writing from different weeks on different machines. The hard drive is a place where quilt and seam can exchange places. Insofar that the hard drive can contain backups from multiple computers, it resembles a quilt: a patchwork of computers or, perhaps more accurately, files. On the other hand, it is a seam because, insofar that each computer is considered a patch, the hard drive goes between them. Hard drives, in all probability, can be exploited in ways which reflect their being both potentially quilt and seam.

Internet over Ethernet

There were files on one laptop that I had written and I wanted to backup these files. I eventually did so However, I did not have deja-dup installed on this machine. Furthermore, I had never connected it to the local area network. I was faced with a choice, I could either use an X-windowing system on that laptop to graphically configure the wifi details. Or, I could use an ethernet connection. I decided I would prefer the latter. However, I did not connect the device to a router via ethernet in order to gain internet access. Instead the process involved proxy arping an ethernet port and a wireless network adaptor on a raspberry pi. I connected the computer to the pi via ethernet and gained internet access that way. I thought about applying this idea of managing devices connected via Ethernet in a different context. I had been thinking about my inability to print as a linux user since the start of the trimester. I considered that a computer could act as a network interface for printers at the book binding station in the Studio. I experimented with this briefly on Thursday 29th February. I bridged two ethernet ports together on an Apple computer. One ethernet port was connected to the internet, the other to the printer. I was inspired to create a subnet on the network on the basis of other experiments I carried out the previous day. It didn't work as effectively as the alternative solution described below.

Printing on chopchop

In a recent meeting we spoke about producing an annotated reader to complement the publication of SI#23. Thus far, my annotations have been a bit thin on the ground. This is mostly because, as a Linux user, I am unable to print using the School’s FollowMe system. I’ve been making annotations with a variety of software and techniques. But it’s not the same as being able to write in the margins of a printed text. On Thursday 29th of February I went to the studio to solve this problem. There are three printers next to the book-binding station in the Studio. Two of these printers are very functional. I decided to plug them in to the School’s network via Ethernet and dig into the CUPS documentation. I quickly realised it was possible to print from Linux machines using both Command Line and Graphical User Interfaces. I printed network reports using the printers’ built in functionality to ascertain the IP addresses of the devices. Then, after some trial and error, I found myself able to print. I would like to setup CUPS on chopchop so that everyone can benefit from free printing.

The printer names are hp-laserjet-p2055dn and hp-color-laserjet-cp5225. Printing is now possible from chopchop using lp filename -d printername. For more information on command line printing, check out the documentation for CUPS as well as lp and related commands.