Fixed HP Compaq 6715b Power Issue?

I had a HP Compaq 6715b laptop lying around which I thought was dead. When pressing the power button, nothing happened, not lights, no beeps, nothing at all.

I came across a hint which seems to be a well-known fix for such issues: unplug the power cord, remove the battery and press the power button for a long time (I did it for around 30s). Afterwards, I connected the power cord without putting the battery back in. Surprise, surprise: the laptop powers up without a problem (after having reconnected the hard drive which I removed ages ago to copy the data).

If this really fixes the problem for good will have to been seen. There are reports on the internet about low-quality motherboards (especially power connection) in the HP laptops of this generation.

Brother MFC-7820N under Kubuntu 14.10 Utopic

  • install Brother driver brscan2 (including adding the line brother2 to /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, see this guide)
  • brsaneconfig2 -q worked but scanimage -L showed “no sane device found”
  • Brother FAQ tells you to copy libs from /usr/lib64/sane to /usr/lib/sane but sane is looking in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane
  • Finally scanimage -L shows device `brother2:net1;dev0′ is a Brother MFC-7820N SCANNER
  • Hint: for debugging of scanimage, use SANE_DEBUG_DLL=3 scanimage -L

Set up Brother MFC-7820N as network scanner under Kubuntu

I’ve set up my Brother MFC-7820N ages ago to print and scan over the network from Kubuntu. Once in a while the router decides to change the IPs of my network devices. So just as a note to myself, here’s how to set up the scanner again:

  • check the setup: brsaneconfig2 -q
  • delete the old entry: brsaneconfig2 -r MFC-7820N
  • determine new IP (as an exercise for the reader)
  • set up new entry: brsaneconfig2 -a name=MFC-7820N model=MFC-7820N ip=192.168.1.35

See also Brother’s guide.

Sun Java JDK & Avahi on Debian

When trying to install sun-java6-jdk on a Debian server (Lenny), I noticed that it automatically installs libnss-mdns as well as avahi-daemon. I’ve got no idea why it would do that as Avahi is the free implementation of Apple’s zeroconf which allows automatic detection of local network devices. On my Debian server it managed to interrupt DNS resolution with local hosts (using a .local address).

Continue reading

Disable Services on MBWE

I’ve been using Western Digital’s MyBook World Edition (white light) for the last half a year or so. Until recently, everything worked fine but last week I noticed that the disk doesn’t spin down anymore. There seems to be constant activity on the device. Using ssh to log in, I noticed that there are quite a lot of services running which I thought I had disabled previously, including twonkymediaserver and miocrawler.

Continue reading

Fix Non-persistent Window Size for Thunderbird

For a while (it might have started in the days of Intrepid/Kubuntu 8.10) my Thunderbird window never remembered its geometry between restarts. When starting TB, I always got a small window which I then had to resize to the desired size. No changes to prefs.js seemed to make a difference. Today, I came across a post which pointed me into the right direction. On Jaunty (Kubuntu 9.04), I had to do the following: Open System Settings, click on Window Behaviour in the section Look & Feel.