Getting a USB Printer Working on Linux Mint 12

Plugged in my USB LaserJet, and it didn't work. I tried hp-setup and localhost:631, but it kept saying nothing was detected.

After some searching, I found out this was a big problem in Ubuntu 11.10.

My solution:
1. Installed the latest available Linux kernel.
2. Added the Ubuntu Precise repo in Synaptic, reloaded the package information, and installed the latest available cups package (also libgnutls and a few other cups-related packages).
3. Disabled the Precise repo. Failure to do so would lead to many tears after I completely messed up my OS.
4. Rebooted and tried hp-setup. Still didn't detect anything.
5. Went to localhost:631 and tried to detect a new printer. Nothing. Experienced an emotion similar to frustration but when you know you are eventually going to get it to work.
6. Entered "nano /var/log/syslog" at the command line after unplugging and replugging the printer. Scrolled to the bottom of the file. It gave me the printer's URI, showed the printer's name, and said it was "re-enabled".
7. Scratched my head.
8. Went back to localhost:631, clicked the "Administration" tab, clicked the "Manage Printers" tab, saw my printer listed. Felt strange emotions, one of which was joy that I had my printer detected, another of which was confusion, as in "is this interface designed optimally?"
9. Printed a test page. It worked.
10. Wrote a blog post in case someone else encounters the same problem.

Wireless on Ubuntu 11.10 and Mint 12

Ubuntu 11.10 has managed to make the wireless internet on my laptop not work. They're great at introducing bugs that never get fixed: this is the only distro with that problem, and I try a lot of distros. The bug carried through to Mint 12 RC, which is of course built on top of Ubuntu 11.10.

I had to install wicd and completely remove network-manager. If you don't remove network-manager, you will get a "Connection Failed: Bad Password" error from wicd if you're using WPA2.

Chainloading GRUB 2 from GRUB

I installed PCLinuxOS on my laptop (more on that some other time - I was impressed). Among the other OSes on there is Debian Squeeze. The problem is that Debian Squeeze uses Grub 2, while PCLinuxOS uses Grub.

After some fruitless searches and guesses as to what to do (Grub knowledge doesn't help much with Grub 2) I decided to check the Arch Wiki. As usual, the answer was there. Add the following entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst in PCLinuxOS:

title Debian
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/grub/core.img

where root (hd0,4) tells Grub that Debian is installed on /dev/sda5.