Blogspot problems

I was surprised to find problems in loading any blog on blogspot.com this morning. Occasional problems are present but even in the evening it was not loading and searched to see if there was a problem reported. Instead I found this http://www.labnol.org/india/blogspot-blogs-inaccessible/18670/ and found that the following suggestion in the post  worked!

http://sethanil.blogspot.com.nyud.net 
Publish Post

Wonder why? 

Another case for Rolling distribution

While it is nice to read a news item like  "Asus will preload Ubuntu Linux on three Eee PCs", statements like the following cause a discordant note:

"The only question left is Asus' decision to ship Ubuntu 10.10 although Ubuntu 11.04 came out back in April."

In the case of open source, the users get to try the software before the vendors get around to it. Hence, rolling distributions are ideal. The vendor-supported OS will not be obsolete from the perspective advanced users and, worse, trade press, which will influence the non-tech consumers.

I wish some vendor would latch on to Arch Linux :)

Fedora 15, CUPS - Why does Canon LBP2900B behave so erratically?

I installed a Canon LBP2900B printer and discovered that the drivers are not included in Fedora. It was easy to get them from http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/contents/ASIA/EN/0900772407.html.

The printer worked but after a reboot, the printer did not seem to work. CUPS insisted on creating an additional LBP2900-2 printer for device usb://Canon/LBP2900, while the correct LBP2900 was on device ccp://localhost:59687.

Ignoring all the false steps, the problem would be overcome by stopping the ccpd server and restarting it.

It took a number of reboots and installing it on Ubuntu 11.04 as well to identify that while the additional entry for the same printer by CUPS was confusing, it was harmless.

The real problem was that /etc/init.d/ccpd service should have two processes. On Fedora 15, it was having only one. However, when I stopped the service and restarted it, it would start correctly with two processes:

$ sudo systemctl status ccpd.service
ccpd.service - LSB: Start Canon Printer Daemon for CUPS
      Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/ccpd)
      Active: active (running) since Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:56:52 +0530; 11min ago
     Process: 5681 ExecStop=/etc/rc.d/init.d/ccpd stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
     Process: 5693 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/ccpd start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Main PID: 5698 (ccpd)
      CGroup: name=systemd:/system/ccpd.service
          ├ 5698 /usr/sbin/ccpd
          ├ 5702 /usr/sbin/ccpd
          └ 5703 captmon2 --data-write-fd=8 --data-read-fd=12 --cmd...

The issue appears to be somehow related to systemd starting services in parallel. The ccpd server probably expects some service to be running which has not yet started.