Patrick's Blog

As far as I can remember ever since I bought the Brother HL-5170DN printer in 2004, I had smaller problems using it under Ubuntu. This included among others the following symptoms: printing works only in Acrobat Reader and not in Gnome programs, Duplex printing does not work properly or printing slides which include lots of plots and pictures takes ages to print.

I think that all these problems have finally gone! And this all thanks to this blog entry. To summarize everything and adapted to Ubuntu Dapper Drake:

1. Download the LPR driver found here. We need the package for Debian.
2. Second download as well the CUPS driver here. Again: we need the Debian package.
3. Install both packages with dpkg -i package-name.deb. This will show you a hell a lot of warnings, but it will still work.
4. Add the printer with the gnome-cups-manager. As driver you need to select: “Brother HL-5170DN for CUPS (en)”. For some odd reasons I had to alter the device URI, as it was set to a default value.

Finally I can strike this through on my TODO list!

Update: For the hl5170dnlpr package to install cleanly, one has to create the directory: /var/spool/lpd and uncomment the last line of /var/lib/dpkg/info/hl5170dnlpr.postinst.

F-spot has a nice feature to browse your photo gallery by some sort of a time-histogram control. This is very handy if you know the date of a specific picture, you’re looking for. But this feature does not help if the EXIF timestamp of the pictures is just plain wrong (which often happens with “old” pictures, i.e. end of 90’s). So I was looking for a way to change the EXIF timestamp of such photos. jhead solves this problem quite nicely (the application is available from the Ubuntu repositories).

Assume in the current directory all pictures are dated 2036:11:06, instead of 2001:11:05, we can then modify the timestamp with a simple:

jhead -da2001:11:05-2036:11:06 *

What makes more sense for the example above is:

jhead -ts2001:11:05-00:00:00 *

Here no time difference computations are involved.

So now the information shown in f-spot reflects the real date, cool!

Update: If the images do not have a EXIF header, one can use the “transplant” function to copy the exif header from another image:

jhead -te image_with_exif.jpg *

Update 2: To rename (more specific number) the pictures inside of a directory, one can use:

jhead -nf%03i *