Second Linux Kernel patch accepted

After my first ever Linux Kernel patch 8 years ago (yes I'm getting old) i successfully got a new one accepted a few weeks ago that fixes the temperature problem i was having with my laptop. Yay for scratching your own itch :-)

XPS viewer for Linux

From time to time people ask me what i use to view XPS in Linux (unfortunately my company uses them for the salary sheets and stuff like that) and my answer is Okular. So that means there is a lack of awareness of all the document formats Okular supports, so remember, if you are forced into an XPS file Okular will help you :-) And yes, it does not implement all the features of the format but all files i have seem to open fine so you know the deal, if you have one that doesn't work, report a bug and maybe then it will work in the next version

Update: BTW Okular is supposed to work (i never tried myself) on other OSes including, Windows, MacOsX, *BSD, etc but seems those people has less problems finding a suitable viewer there

Printing hack in KPDF 0.5.7

KPDF is usually good enough at printing documents, but sometimes it fails completely.

And there's nothing worse that having a document you need to print and not beign able to do it. To fix that situation i just added a small hack to KPDF version that will be released with KDE 3.5.7.

In that version there will be a PDF Options tab with a Force rasterization checkmark that will let you force KPDF to render each PDF page to an image and print the image instead convert PDF commands into PS commands. This is bad as you lose the vector side of having a PS, but in cases KPDF did show the document correctly, but printing failed, i think it will be a welcome addition.

HPLIP team rocks

So i had a problem printing a PS file. First i did was contact our resident KDE printing guru, Kurt Pfeifle.

He ensured me the file seemed correct as three different PostScript printers printed the file correctly so it might be a problem in the HPLIP driver of my HP PSC 1610

Today i contacted the hplip-help mailing list:
16:37:23 - my mail reaches the list
17:39:34 - an HP engineer contacts me so so i send him the file in private (as it contains semi-sensitive data)
18:17:04 - i send the file
19:12:43 - confirmation that they can reproduce the problem (yay! for bug reproductivity)
23:30:38 - i get a patch for latest HPLIP release making my PS file print correctly

Now try to do this on windows...