Let me start off by saying, “What a Mess!” About 2.5 weeks ago (probably 3 by the time I post this!) I bought an HP Deskjet 2050 printer at Walmart, it was cheap, had a flatbed scanner, came with “full” ink cartridges, and only a USB connection option. It was $49.00, $20 more than the printer that looked identical, but was not a flatbed scanner. I thought that HP of all companies would have linux support, even for newer model printers, oh there is support for it… If you can find it. (I’ll be putting up a separate post with plenty of links and re-written documentation for installing this and other HP printers in Ubuntu in the next week or two, kinda busy this weekend, so doubt it will get done before next week)

First thing I did was to go to HP’s website and download a driver, I wasn’t even going to fool with the included CD (actually not sure it even had one). I found it within a minute or two, all seemed good. Installed the driver and plugged the printer in, everything went fine. I believe I even printed something that day just clicked print and it spit right out! Well, next to happen was my wife is using my ChromeOS CR-48 netbook and wanted to print something, so I went to look into setting up Google Cloud Print. I figured, yeah cloud print, that should work… Google has two operating systems in their pockets and both are linux based, piece of cake to use cloud print with linux, right? wrong…

Google Cloud Print requires a Windows computer running the beta Google Chrome browser (or a Mac, but why would you want to use a Mac?) (an fyi, the Linux Chrome Browser only comes in Beta!), a bit confused and disappointed (happens a lot with Google these days), I thought, oh well, good thing I have 5 or 6 Windows Virtual Machines setup already! I popped onto a Win7 VM and setup Google Cloud Print and told my wife “Good to Go!” only took me 30-45 minutes to figure all that out and set it up (I forgot to share it with her gmail ID the first go round!).

Success! it printed!
I love first try attempts that work out great!

So next I had to fill out some paperwork for work and email it back, so I printed the pages that needed signing and filled them out, then tried scan them back in… the scanner would not scan (using simple scan) unless I unplugged the USB cable for 10 seconds or so, then plugged it back in… (more on that at the end of this post, I have a theory). Well after 3-5 pages of this over 1-2 hours, out of about 12 pages, popping the USB cable out stopped working. I wasn’t sure why it needed it in the first place, I had checked to make sure the printer was not attached to a VM at the time… So instead I tried setting it up to scan off the Win7 VM I was using for Cloud Printing (just a note, this was all happening maybe 4 days after the cloud print setup), the scanning application from HP worked fine until I was done. Weird though, again if I did not use the printer for an hour or two, or the VM was paused, or the screen saver came on, I had to unplug the USB cable again…

ok, so history done, up to my issue that started last night…

Actually the issue started on Saturday, but I was pre-occupied and didn’t really try too hard to get it resolved. My wife sent something to the printer from the netbook, I started up the VM for the Win7 Cloud Print, and it never printed. The first document just says “In Progress” and the date submitted was showing 3 days ago when I deleted it. I’ve powered off the Printer for 30+ minutes, I’ve rebooted my computer 4 times, leaving it powered off for about 8 hours once, popped the USB cable, nothing worked. I tried printing locally from Ubuntu and still nothing comes out, just says “Processing”. I did some digging online and found some “directions” for setting up the printer in linux, most of which was on HP’s website, and I never did any of it, including downloading the driver source files and doing a Build, Make, Install on them. So I started following the directions (did not build the driver, it seems to be installed and functioning, as Ubuntu can tell if it is plugged in or not and shows the correct device name), and found a huge list of dependencies that it says to install, I tried it and sure enough I did not have most of it installed on my system yet. About 78MB worth to be specific. I let it run, and noticed a new kernel was available, so I updated that while I was at it… 3 reboots later (not necessary, just kept trying to get things working) and I have no change in the current situation.

So, right now I have no working printer at all, not even scanning is working. It shows it is online, I have enabled it, shared it, allowed internet printing on it (none of which I did when I installed it, only did that after it stopped working).


Now, I’ve had some time to think about it, and I have been having USB issues with Ubuntu the entire time I’ve been running it. My USB webcam and Skype have fighting matches everytime I reboot my system, it never detects and adds the webcam as a valid hardware device, I have to manually configure the microphone each restart, and the video sometimes requires I unplug the webcam and then plug it back in and restart Skype. Other USB devices (I have a USB wireless headset and KB, external drives, my android phone), have all had issues that has required me to restart the computer or plug and unplug the device over and over several times.

This made me think I should run “lsusb -v” on my system to take a look at the devices that the system thinks I have. Well the command does nothing, it just hangs and never runs or finishes running, I have to kill the process AND the terminal window process to get it to stop. I missed this in the printer issue above, but I tried running the hp-setup app that came with the driver and it hangs on detecting the printer when I select USB as the connection type, as well.

So I have determined that the issue is with my Ubuntu installation and the USB service (this occurred to me actually right before I started typing this up). I have not yet started looking into the USB issue and will be doing so tonight. I’ll post a second post instead of updating this one with any results I find out, or if I nuke and reinstall… as a note if I do reinstall, it will not be Ubuntu 11. Also planning on typing up a how to properly install an HP printer on Ubuntu 10.10 x64 guide too.

Lots of things going on, not enough time to tell about them. I am still running the Beast Rom v2.2.1 on my Notion Ink Adam, and not having any issues to complain about, I have used UnrEvoked on my HTC Evo to root it, removed the Sprint apps I didn’t want and started backing up with Clockwork Mod and Titanium Backup. Still running Ubuntu 10.10 x64 exclusively on my desktop, I’ve been working on learning Java and think I’m picking it up pretty quick, although there are nuances I still do not have down. Maybe after 4-6 months I’ll take an intermediate level course on Java and see if they can tell me the small things I am missing from not having an instructor. Some time around January I’ll start learning Android specifics, by then I should be getting up to speed on java graphics and UI interfaces, right now I am just doing console coding.

I lost a large quantity of data from my drives last week, there appears to be an issue with my external drive caddy, when I bootup sometimes one of the drives is not recognized, normally a reboot operation clears it right up. Last week I shut my systems down for a bad storm, in case we lost power for an extended time as the storm was about 2am. Well during startup it had no issue finding the drive that normally didn’t startup, but it did do a disk consistency check, which happens every now and then and no big deal I thought. A few hours after that I went to startup my virtual machine so I could work on my java code and VMware told me some VM drives were missing, I didn’t think much of it, as I had been rearranging and deleting some old VMs recently and started up my Android-SDK VM, launched Eclipse (I move to using Eclipse instead of Appcellerator’s Titanium Mobile Developer, because It has a code editor and Appcellerator decided not to include one…) Well it couldn’t find my files, so I started looking and my data store drive was there, had files in it, but all of my directories were missing!

First things first, I rebooted, thinking there was an issue mounting during startup, well it was the same when it came back up. I checked the trash, in case I accidentally deleted them, nothing was there. I moved to a terminal session and checked the drive space on my mounts and saw there was 173GB of data on my 1TB drive, but no files to show for it (previously there was over 750GB of data on the drive). Well I found a large portion of them in a .trash-1000 folder, not sure about most of you, but I copy every CD I’ve ever gotten since 1997 on to my hard drive as a backup, well that was the end of my backups for a large bit of it. Two days later I found another 140GB on my old Windows 7 boot drive that I apparently copied off of, but never removed the original. So I’m out about 55-65% of my backup data, most of which the CD’s are either missing or damaged beyond use. Probably 60-80% of my backups are either things I have never actually used, or only installed to see what it did, then uninstalled it. So I am not really out too much, just makes me feel empty inside… Most of what I lost that I actually use were my Microsoft disks, having been a Microsoft partner for about 4 years and working a lot with Virtual Machines I had everything stored in .iso format, and about 2 years ago Microsoft moved to .iso format and I was keeping up with all available software via the download site. So I basically lost everything that was released by MS in the last 2 years and since I am no longer a MS partner I no longer have access to those downloads. (this includes Win7 and Office 2010) I guess it is a good idea that I don’t run windows as my OS anymore!

Happy Birthday to me! Well, not really me… Today is the 1 year anniversary of the first post of http://joelperryproductions.com Wow, thank you web! I’ll give a few stats here, not super impressive, but considering I have not done any advertising, no marketing, and I don’t even have a sign on my car!

  • Total page views: 45,690
  • Total visitors: 20,481
  • Most visited post: Ubuntu 10.04 x64 and installing Appcelerator Titanium Desktop mobile device development environment – a how to – with 2,850 visitors
  • Most viewed post:
  • Most visitors per country: The United States with 6,528 (this was not always the case, the Russian Federation was #1 for the first 7 or 8 months)
  • Most simultaneous visitors: somewhere around 78 and it happened June 8th, 2010
  • Most visitors in a day: 118 on June 8th, 2010
  • Most visitors in a month: 2251 in June 2010
  • Most page views in a day: 985 on August 26th 2010
  • Most page views in a month: 5,862 in June 2010
  • Number of Posts on the website: 85 plus this one and two more in draft

Right so, I’ve been busy lately, got some really great new posts up, added the Android App section and learned a good bit of new things too! Most recently I completed a 4 part post about getting Appcelerator Titanium Developer installed and running on an Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit VMware Virtual machine, after a lot of work (and still more to come) plus 2 follow-up posts for resolving some errors and other issues while using it. I am happy to say it is fully functional and configured to test both desktop and Android mobile apps! I’ve resolved some issues that have been posted on the support forums since 2008 and still do not have instructions on how to resolve them posted, if any responses at all. I am ramping up to start java coding, I have some really big ideas and have already started assembling a development team to work on the app designs! I am hoping to get an Android App on the Market by the end of June, and maybe do a complete clean re-write for iOS by the holiday season or early 2012! I’ve also got some big personal news coming up here shortly, but no hints, sorry! I may get around to posting some more personal type things later this year (finally) and I have several new techno toys to get in trouble with this year as well!

If you have not noticed yet, I am very excited and definitely have my Mojo flowing!! I hope to wrap up my Titanium adventures early next week, and get some more Android app semi-reviews posted, I have about 8 more already rough drafted out on paper that I need to type in an polish up, not to mention another 250 apps that I have used that still need to be written up! AND I’ve added almost a dozen new apps to my phone in just the last 2 weeks! I really think this year will be a busy one, my goal is to get more than double the number of visitors this year! (should not be too hard if my Android project ends up with Dev support on this site, if all things go well I might be self hosting the website next year!)

If you think you have something interesting for me to check out, you can always put a comment on the newest of these welcome pages, I see everything that gets posted, so never fear I will (eventually!) read it… I’ll be happy to consider the idea and see if I can take a look and maybe write up a post on it.

Enjoy the site!

So, I’ve been having a really hard time getting the Kitchen Sink app to load in an emulator using Appcelerator’s Kitchen Sink, I have been hacking away for 4 days now thinking I screwed up my installation guide I just spent 3 weeks working on, when I finally figured out some solutions! Now I cannot take complete credit for this, as I did get a lot of my information from developer.appcelerator.com/questions/created and appcelerator.lighthouseapp.com/projects/32238/tickets I have combined the results of 9 or 10 different posts along with some other tweaks I have made (and updated in my installation guide), and finally an astute observation on my part, to get this to work. So, if you have followed my guide then there is not too much more to do, if you are having this problem and did not follow my guide, then go ahead and give these fixes a try, then check out posts 1-4 with Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit and see if you missed anything.

Here is what I was receiving when I tried launching the kitchen sink before.


[INFO] Launching Android emulator...one moment
[INFO] Creating new Android Virtual Device (2 WVGA800)
[ERROR] Exception occured while building android project:
[ERROR] Traceback (most recent call last):
[ERROR] File "/opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/builder.py", line 1622, in
[ERROR] s.run_emulator(avd_id, avd_skin)
[ERROR] File /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/builder.py", line 348, in run_emulator
[ERROR] avd_name = self.create_avd(avd_id,avd_skin)
[ERROR] File /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/builder.py", line 318, in create_avd
[ERROR] inifilec = open(inifile,'r').read()
[ERROR] IOError: (Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/sdk/.titanium/avd/titanium_2_WVGA800.avd/config.ini
[INFO] Building KitchenSink for Android ... one moment
[ERROR] JDK version detected, but 1.6 is required

Very confusing output, I have been concentrating on the file line as my main issue, and the ADV errors I was hoping would resolve themselves afterwards. I made a few changes to my guide while trying to resolve this, nothing made it worse! hopefully some of it helped though!

***update on this (really only 45 minutes later), I have resolved most of this issue! I created several AVDs with the name and specifications that the emulator was looking for and the AVD launched the KitchenSink! here are the steps to resolve this issue! This requires some pre-configuration on your part to work, I’ll add notes for steps I remember this on.

  1. android – launches /opt/[android-sdk folder]/tools/android
    1. click new
    2. name=titanium_2_WVGA800 – change the number “2″ to what ever number is there in your DEBUG log [DEBUG] AVD ID: #
    3. give it an SD card of some size (I used 25MB)
    4. target set to whatever Google API you want to use (just make sure it is greater than or equal to 1.6)
    5. click “create AVD”
  2. go back to Titanium
  3. select kitchen sink under the projects column on the left
  4. click the edit tab
  5. change the Titanium SDK to 1.2 (not 1.6!!)
  6. now go to test & package
  7. set the SDK to any Android SDK
  8. change the filter to trace
  9. click launch

now try and launch the KitchenSink (my AVD loaded in less than 3 minutes, was not locked and my VM went up to 430MB of RAM and peaked at 45% and 100% on the two CPU cores). It seems the Titanium SDK 1.6 is causing all the issues. I figured this out when it struck me the version is 1.0 (Titanium default starting version)and the date is 2009, Titanium SDK 1.6 was just released, so it has to be the incorrect version!


So the next issue is the last line of the code output above: JDK version detected, but 1.6 is required
I’m still working on this one, so I’ll post it in another post a little bit later after I get it figured out, but right now the Emu is running, the apps in it run, and I think this will allow me and you to start coding!

*** update – I found the prereq.py script located in three locations (might be why when some users replaced it with the modified one in the forum it still didn’t work, as they put it in the wrong place!

  • /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/[ver]/[platform]
    1. 1.6.0/android
    2. 1.6.0/iphone
    3. 1.2.0/android

first thing I did after finding nothing online when searching was to backup the file
sudo cp /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/prereq.py /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/prereq.py.bak && sudo cp /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/prereq.pyc /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/prereq.pyc.bak
and then I edited the file to try and fix it! I tried putting my $JAVA_HOME variable before the command “javac” but that returned no JDK installed instead of wrong version, so I tried putting the path to the jdk link in there (/opt/java/jdk-linked/bin/javac) and that returned this line:
JDK version 1.6.0_21 detected, but 1.6 is required
this told me right away that prereq.py is no longer valid and needs to be updated, again, slack programming by a “professional” development company, maybe they need to stop using their Unix wannabe Mac systems and actually use Linux… so I made another change to the file so that it was looking for exactly what it found (this could be dangerous, as it invalidates the check; however I have manually verified that everything is good, and my AVD runs fine at this point, so the only issue is that this python script is bogus. Someone who actually knows python can step in and tell me what I need to put if they would like).

  • sudo vi /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/prereq.py – you may need to make changes if you are using windows or OS X to that location, and edit it with a different editor (do a find on the prereq.py file, that is what I did to find it)
  • 17G – using VI as your editor, this will jump you to line 17, the one we need to edit, it is the one that has javac on it and does not have cmd.exe (that would be the windows users line)
  • 9ww – that should skip you up to the “j” in javac
  • i – leaves command mode and begins edit mode inserting the cursor before the “j” in javac
  • /opt/java/jdk-linked/bin/ – the location to javac, if you did not follow my guide to set this up you will need to edit that line based off of where you installed the JDK, when in doubt do a find for javac
  • [esc] – that will take us out of edit mode and back into command mode (also moves the cursor back one space, never figured that out myself…)
  • 4j – that will move us down four lines to the “if not version.startswith…” line
  • use the “h” and “l” keys to move left and right until the cursor is on top of the 6 and type the following a.0_21[esc] – that should have changed the 1.6 to 1.6.0_21 (you should change this to what ever is displayed when you type “javac -version” from the command line!), for example my install is showing 1.6.0_21, therefore my entire line looks like this:
    • if not version.startswith(“1.6.0_21″):
  • :wq! – this will save the change and quit
  • sudo /opt/titanium/mobilesdk/linux/1.6.0/android/prereq.py – should not give that error anymore; it did however display the path to my android sdk home directory (/opt/android-sdk)
  • the prereq.pyc file is the compiled version of prereq.py, hopefully it will be updated automatically, but we made a backup earlier just in case.


    This next issue appears to have been resolved by one of the solutions I found above. I am posting it here anyway, in case someone else has run into issues with this and does a search, hopefully they will find this post as a resolution.


    [TRACE] wait_for_device returned: List of devices attached
    [TRACE]
    [TRACE]
    [DEBUG] /opt/android-sdk/tools/adb -e devices

    This just keeps repeating in the window over and over, I have let it sit for 30 minutes and it just keeps going about one repetition per second. If I re-click the “launch” button it does it maybe 4 times before building the kitchen sink, then it does some other things, builder.py line 803 – , line 622 – build and run, and line 112 – wait_for_device, then time.sleep(1) and KeyboardInterrupt and then it just stops there, if I re-launch it goes back to just repeating the above code, it is not a perfect loop, sometimes it will do the repeating over and over a couple of launch clicks in a row before going back to the builder.py lines.

    For what it’s worth, I get the exact same issue (with the same resolutions) if I create a new project and try to run it with Titanium’s SDK 1.6.0. Now one of the forum posts on developer.appcelerator.com stated that 1GB of RAM was not enough to use Titanium and that they have a 4GB win XP machine that normally uses ~2.6GB when they have Titanium running. so with out checking first, I shutdown my VM and bumped the RAM up to 2GB (from 1GB) and then started it up again and launched System Monitor, then tried building the KitchenSink and a blank new app called testapp1. My Linux Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit Virtual Machine with 2 CPU cores assigned, was using a whopping 201MB of RAM and the two cores were at 12.4% and 16.2% utilization. From this we can infer that either absolutely nothing is happening, or somebody is full of it. (I’m thinking the system is just sitting idle and not doing anything myself…).

    Now, I know that VM’s work better with less resources assigned to them, and only increasing those levels if the system is pushing it’s limits. So, I decided to cut it back to 512MB of RAM and 1 CPU core to see what happens (I also shut down the 3 other VMs I had running on my machine).

    *** solution – I believe that creating the AVD with the name that Titanium was looking for resolved this 3rd problem for me, as it is no longer occurring. Additionally, (and I have updated my installation guide to match) I have found that my Ubuntu VM runs about 450MB of RAM and 1 CPU core at 100% with another at >25% when the AVD is running. So, I have adjusted my VM to 768MB of RAM total (originally I was using 1GB, then I upped it to 2GB) and 2 CPU cores (no change there). I have not had any issues with maxing out those resources and so far the VM has used 0KB of swap.

    I have been having some other issues, and they will be coming in a follow-up post to this one (as a hint, I have resolved the libenchant error messages already, but detected another one in the meantime that I am still working on).

15 visitors online now
3 guests, 12 bots, 0 members
Max visitors today: 26 at 11:53 am PST
This month: 26 at 02-09-2012 11:53 am PST
This year: 29 at 01-11-2012 02:49 pm PST
All time: 1100 at 08-08-2011 08:11 pm PDT
View in: Mobile | Standard