Raspbery Pi3 (RPI3) as a multimedia server and client, and general purpose PC  

• DLNA/UPNP server with  local and remote (Internet) clients, DVR client and server, Subsonic server with Android client
• Use of the Raspberry Pi as a general for web browsing and access to email using Dillo, Kweb, Netsurf, Yahoo! mail and Gmail   

These are some technical notes on:

• streaming music and video services over a LAN and over the Internet using two Rasperry Pis
• use of a Pi3 as a general purpose PC  for web browsing and email using Dillo, Netsurf, Kweb and Alpine (including some tips on using this software on the Pi)

These are not comprehensive notes but some tips on what can be time-consuming to set up initially but quite quick to install if a defined process is followed.

Hardware and software

• RPi3 running 
• Web browsers
• Kodi (inc a mythtv client) and mythfrontend 
• Subsonic server
• minidlna (DLNA compliant server)
• bubbleupnpserver available over the Internet
• email clients 
• libreoffice

• Separate (remote on the LAN) RPi3 running:
• mythbackend and connected to a PCTV USB Freeview tuner

• Panasonic Viera TX-40DX700B as a DLNA client

• Google Pixel as an Android client running:
• Subsonic clients
• mythtv client (using the excellent mythling app)

Startup
Some basic notes on setting up an RPI3 for multimedia 

Connect a minimum 8GB flash card to another PC.  For Linux users the flash card can be formatted with Gparted. Now mount the flashcard

sudo mount [flash card device]

Download NOOBS onto the flash card. For some reason, I find NOOBS a more reliable way of booting a new Pi than the Raspbian image. Unzip the zip file onto the flash card place into the pi and boot to the Pi. On an 8 Gb card there is not enough room for the full Raspian graphical desktop install so a workaround is to install Raspian lite and then upgrade to a graphical desktop, e.g.:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install lxde [if you want lxde]

This takes up less space than the default graphical install.

The first two steps must be carried out otherwise the relevant packages will not be retrieved.  Next some configuration is required in order to make the display look acceptable and make some other useful tweaks:

sudo raspi-config

Some useful settings at this stage (which are well-documented elsewhere):

set the monitor resolution
set an overscan option (if black borders appear around your screen)
change the user password
allocate 256B to GPU memory for smooth HD video playback
set an audio output option (analog headphone socket or HDMI) 

Web browsers 

Standard Web browsers can be extremely slow on the Raspberry Pi. Some recommendations below.

dillo 

sudo apt-get install dillo

A very fast and lightweight browser best for searching and reading web pages which are predominantly text (pages with frames can be almost unusable). No Javascript so many web pages won’t have their full functionality but it can feel like a holiday not to be continually bombarded by adverts.

This browser has an interesting history as it originated with the noble aim of ensuring everyone could access the Internet no matter how basic their connection equipment (e.g. dial-up)

Tip. It is interesting to launch dillo from a terminal window and look in the terminal window at what dillo shows about which sites are trying to receive your browsing history. Example:

Domain: DENIED www.bbc.co.uk  b.scorecardresearch.com

kweb 

A good compromise between speed and functionality. Can be installed as follows (for Stretch):

wget http://steinerdatenbank.de/software/kweb-1.6.9.tar.gz
tar -xzf kweb-1.6.9.tar.gz
cd kweb-1.6.9
./debinstall

Installing from the git repsitory is more complicated because dependencies are not automatically installed

You can comfortably use kweb for a site like blogger which needs Javascript.

Tip. You may find it necessary to install the following additional package:

sudo apt-get install python-tk Tip.

Tip. Install omxplayer (a brilliantly efficient media player) so you can press the Play button in kweb and play media without Javascript or cookies enabled

Tip. Keep Javascript switched off for speed of browsing and Cookies off for privacy. Enable both if required for navigation/page rendering aannd certainly for Internet shopping. Complex sites may however make the Pi run very slowly.m

Tip. Many of us are used to entering searches in the browser address bar. Kweb can do this if the search string is prefixed by ? e.g.:

?how to install kweb

netsurf

Fast, and the page rendering is good but lacks Javascript, apparently not by design but because Javascript support has not yet been implemented.

Feels more like a standard browsing experience than dillo (although not as fast). Tabbed browsing is helpful

Using the Raspberry Pi for e-mail

For a lightweight client Claws Mail is a good choice. Can handle multiple email providers including  Yahoo! and Gmail.

For Web mail, Gmail works well in html view. 

Yahoo! Mail uses far too much memory in the default view. With Javascript switched on, go into settings and switch the view to Basic. You can subsequently access Yahoo mail without the Javascript and hence without the adverts.

There is a problem using Yahoo! Mail with Netsurf because Yahoo seems to think Netsurf is a mobile phone (and it seems impossible to configure the Netsurf User Agent in order to present Netsurf as another browser to Web sites). Hence you can't seem to get beyond a page promoting the Yahoo! app. A workaround is to display the Inbox in another browser and copy the mailbox URL into a Netsurf bookmark. In Netsurf you then need to log on (with cookies enabled) and then call up the Inbox from the bookmark.

Yahoo! Mail feels clunky in any view on the RPi. If you have multiple email providers a good option is to configure Gmail to use the other provider(s).  Note that the option to do this (Accounts and Import)  is not present in HTML view, you have to switch to standard view. However, once you switch back to HTML view you can see, and use, the imported emails. You can configure Gmail to respond to emails using the recipient's identity (e.g. respond to an incoming Yahoo! email using your Yahoo! email identity) and this works in HTML view. However in HTML view you can't seem to choose which identity to use at the point of replying (that appears to need Javascript).   

Alpine

Alpine is a fast and highly configurable text-based email client. There are a number of guides to setting up alpine with gmail including this one.

If you are using 2-step verification with gmail you need to set up a 16-character password associated with alpine. The command
touch .pine-passfile
in your home directory will cause Alpine to prompt you to save the password.

Alpine address book 

The Alpine address book is typically stored in ~/.addressbook and has a simple tab-delimited format. It is fairly straightforward to convert address books from other email clients into the Alpine address book format.  

Here is an example of such a conversion. If you can export and address book in the LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) (e.g. in Claws-mail), there is a useful shell script you can download to convert an LDIF file to CSV. To use this script, download it, make it executable, "cat" the file and then pipe the output to the shell-script, adding to the shell script name a space-separated list of LDIF fields, e.g.

cat ldif.txt  | ./ldif-to-csv.sh givenName displayName mail > output.csv

where givenName etc. are the LDIF field names. 

To note that inverted commas must be edited out of the LDIF file otherwise the shell script will not work. 

The file can now be opened in Libreoffice calc, edited, and then output as a tab-delimited file (which should be saved in ~/.addressbook.

   

mythtv client

In my experience kodi works better as a mythtv client on the pi I assume because the excellent omxplayer is used (if you set it) to play the video. The mythtv client is good for SD resolution, HD resolution is OK but memory usage has to be minimised as far as possible. kodi playback is detectably better.

I tested this using a short section of recorded video where the mythtv frontend produced a small amount of pixellation with the mythtv frontend but no pixellation with the kodi frontend.    

the mythtv frontend

Instructions here: https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_Light

As noted in the instructions, the firmware does need to be updated otherwise the frontend will report missing libraries and will not start. Don't try to skip the firmware update.

Memory dedicated to non-mythtv tasks needs to be minimised. The graphical desktop or windows client makes a big difference, I use dwm which is reported to run on only 1MB of RAM. A standard window manager can be abandoned altogether and just the mythtv frontend run instead. For instance a .desktop file can be created in /usr/share/xsessions such as the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=myth
Comment=Mythtv frontend
Exec=mythfrontend
Icon=dwm # I retained this icon
Type=XSession

With this file created, an option to use mythfrontend appears in the menu on the password screen of Light Display Manager. So you run mythfrontend instead LXDE, Openbox etc. This is not officially endorsed because there can be problems running external programs from mythfrontend but for functionality internal to mythtv it seems to work fine.

In the video profile screen of mythfrontend, OpenMAX High Quality or openMAX normal must be used. In addition, select the Edit button against the "if" statement governing the selection of a renderer:

if res > [etc]

and make sure that the decoder is openmax.

For sound, use mythtv's internal volume controls and set the mixer as OpenMAX (analog or digital depending on your setup).

It is possible to create a directory of links to mythtv recordings using the Perl script mythlink.pl and run omxplayer from the command line. The script (which works fine with v.0.28 of mythtv and which resides in /usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/user_jobs/) should be excutable. It needs an additional Perl module which can be installed as follows:

 sudo cpan install IO::Socket::INET6

The script can be run as simply as:

./mythlink.pl --link [outputdirectory]

The location of the database is automatically detected and the default options make identification of the relevant file straightforward.

kodi as a mythtv client

The performance of kodi as a mythtv client on the Pi is impressive, both the interface and the playback. I think this is the way to go for viewing mythtv content   To install:

sudo apt-get install kodi
sudo apt-get kodi-pvr-mythtv

There is little to configure if the backend is set up correctly. HD playback is crisp and smooth.

The command line may still be useful if you wanted to sequentially play all media in a directory for which the following can be used:

for file in [directory]/*
do
omxplayer $file
done

minidlna
  
Minidlna allows a DLNA-compliant server to be run on the Pi. It is simple to set up and works very well with my Panasonic Viera TX-40DX700B Smart TV as a client.

There is plenty of guidance on the Web. A key setting in the configuration file is:

inotify=yes

which means the database will be updated as soon as any new media is added to the relevant directories.    
 

Subsonic 

Download Java from the Oracle Website. As far as I know there is no way to install the right version of Java using apt-get.

This is a useful site for information about installing Java and setting up Java environment variables:

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-private-streaming-mus-1583221462

A deb file can be downloaded from here [relfects the current version at the time of writing]:

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/download2.jsp?target=subsonic-6.1.3.deb

then:

sudo dpkg -i subsonic-6.1.3.deb

Note that, as downloaded, transcoding will not work because Subsonic installs incompatible binaries for ffmpeg and lame  in /var/subsonic/transcode. This has the effect that Subsonic will try to transcode a media file (if the original file is larger than the allowable streamed size) but this will fail and the Android client sticks at "Downloading 0B". Install ffmpeg and lame separately and copy to the Subsonic directory:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install lame 
sudo cp /usr/bin/ffmpeg /var/subsonic/transcode/ffmpeg 
sudo cp /usr/bin/ffmpeg /var/subsonic/transcode/lame

Subsonic is configured using a Web interface:

http://localhost:4040

I find this is never accessible by default if the Subsonic service is run as a user (rather than root). It appears to be something to do with permissions on the /var/subsonic folder (where the database resides). I find it is possible to get the service running as a user (rather than root) by changing ownership of /var/subsonic to the user. This seems to also require deleting the database in /var/subsonic/db and letting Subsonic recreate it. Due to a lack of documentation it is difficult to know exactly what fixes this but using these techniques I can get the service running as a user.    

bubbleupnpserver

Very useful and flexible server which acts as container for other UPNP servers and provides access to them over a LAN and over the Internet. All DLNA and UPNP server content can be made available including mythtv. Well documented and has extensive configuration options, especially on the mobile client.   

Instructions are here:

https://bubblesoftapps.com/bubbleupnpserver/

To install on the Pi:

wget https://launchpad.net/~bubbleguuum/+archive/bubbleupnpserver/+files/bubbleupnpserver_0.9-5_all.deb

sudo dpkg -i bubbleupnpserver_0.9-5_all.deb

Make sure port 58050 is open as the service is configured using:

http://localhost:58050

I had no problems connecting (unlike Subsonic). 

Connection over the Internet is possible using a dynamic DNS service.

The version of ffmpeg installed using apt-get must be copied to the /usr/share/bubbleupnpserver folder on the server otherwise transcoding will not work.  The default binary will not work on the Pi (same issue as Subsonic). 


It is straightforward to download music and videos at different levels of the folder hierarchy and then play the media offline. So a directory, album, song etc can be downloaded. 

Android clients

mythling

A reliable mythtv client. Provides, on both the local network and the Internet access to:

• Live TV
• Recordings
• Programme guide
• Videos
• Music  

In order to access the Mythtv over the Internet you just configure Mythling with your external address, preferably using a static IP service (dynDNS, No-IP etc) if your external address is dynamic and likely to change frequently.    

Creating a photo slideshow from the Linux command line

This is a quick and fairly straightforward way to create photo slideshows from the Linux command line using a script called dvd-slideshow and a related script called dir2slideshow.

The examples below generate a 720p  slideshow and are based on Ubuntu.

First, install  dvd-slideshow:

apt-get install dvd-slideshow

This will also install dir2slideshow.

The dvd-slideshow script is quite old (it was last updated in 2011) but it still works and is very useful. The script needs to be edited in order to generate an acceptable bit rate for higher definition videos because dvd-slideshow was designed for DVD resolution. 

On Ubuntu, the  dvd-slideshow script is in /usr/bin. To check its location on other distributions you can enter:

which dvd-slideshow

Since we are going to be using  the Flash video format (which works well for these purposes) we need to change the default bit rate for the flv format.

As superuser, open the script in an editor.

sudo gedit /usr/bin/dvd-slideshow

We need to navigate to the following section of code. At the beginning of this section, the script is checking whether the user has requested high quality (in which case the bit rate will be 2000000 bytes per second, or 2 megabits per second) or low quality (in which case the bit rate will be 5000000 bytes per second, or 500 kilobits per second). If neither, the bit rate will default to 1000000, or 1Mbps. All of these are too low for our purposes so we need to add an extra zero to the default bit rate. It should now read: video_bitrate=10000000 which is 10 Mbps (actually higher than Google's recommended bitrate for 720p).          

if [ "$output_format" == 'flv' ] ; then  # FLV

# need to change this to be dynamic (proportinal to size)

# video_bitrate=$(( 6000 * $dvd_width / 480 ))

if [ $high_quality -eq 1 ] ; then

video_bitrate=2000000  # this works ok for 320x240. 

qscale='-qscale 1'

framerate=30;

frames_per_ms=30000;

ppmtoy4m_frc='30:1'  # 30 fps

elif [ $low_quality -eq 1 ] ; then

video_bitrate=500000  # this works ok for 320x240. 

qscale='-qscale 7'

else

video_bitrate=1000000  # this works ok for 320x240. 

qscale='-qscale 5'

framerate='15'  # is this needed for .flv?

frames_per_ms=15000  # in ms

ppmtoy4m_frc='15:1'  # 15 fps

fi

Since we have hard-coded the bitrate for Flash video we need to remember not to request high or low quality when running dvd-slideshow otherwise that will override the default bit rate. 

We can now proceed to create a slideshow. Ensure all the images  for your slideshow are in a single directory, or a directory plus its sub-directories. I am not sure if all images have to be in JPEG format, but mine always are.  The dir2slideshow script allows to you set certain parameters for your slideshow which it will then output to a text file (which acts as an input to dvd-slideshow). There is documentation on Sourceforge about this script or you can  man dir2slideshow. The obvious parameters to set are the location of input and output directories as well as the duration of images and the type/duration of transitions. Here is an example:

dir2slideshow -n TEXT_FILE -c 1 -notitle IMAGE_DIRECTORY

In this example, the script builds TEXT_FILE from the image filenames in IMAGE_DIRECTORY and specifies a crossfade between each image of 1 second. The default image duration is 5 seconds but  a different duration can be specified with the -t switch. I usually avoid a title slide being generated because I design the title slide in Gimp and put it in the image directory. 

Once the TEXT_FILE has been generated it acts as an input to dvd-slideshow.There is documentation on this script on Sourceforge  or, once again, you can  man dvd-slideshow.    

Here is an example of the use of dvd-slideshow:

dvd-slideshow -s 1280x720 -n SLIDESHOW_NAME -f TEXT_FILE -a AUDIO_FILE -V 2 -w -o OUTPUT_DIRECTORY -flv

This means:

Switch and value	Meaning
-s 1280x720	Size of the video in pixels (720p)
-n SLIDESHOW_NAME	Name of the video file that will be generated
-f TEXT_FILE	Text file that was output by the dir2slideshow script
-a AUDIO_FILE	Audio file which will provide the soundtrack
-V 2	Verbose output, useful for checking that the script is behaving as expected
-w	Widescreen format
-o OUTPUT_DIRECTORY	Output directory of the video file
-flv	Flash video format

For finer-grained control of the audio format and bit rate the audio file can be muliplexed with the video file using ffmpeg (the subject of a future blog post).

      

Getting mailto links to work with Google Chrome and DWM

The issue here is that mailto links in Web pages should run up client email software (where installed) when clicked in Google Chrome  under Linux. However this doesn't work unless a desktop environment (like Gnome) is installed.

This blog post provides a workaround for dwm users and was tested under Ubuntu Xenial (6.04.1 LTS). It might cause mailto links to fail under other desktop environments so take a backup of your work as recommended below.

When a mailto link such as nonesuchperson@nonesuchaddress.com is selected, Google Chrome calls a program called xdg-email located in /usr/bin.

xdg-email is a script which checks to see which desktop environment (DE) is being used and then, if possible, runs up a mail compose Window in email client software like Thunderbird. It is called by Google Chrome (but not apparently by Firefox) when a mailto link is clicked. However,  if you are not using a desktop environment, Chrome just runs up an empty browser window.  

The solution I identified was to force xdg-email to think I am using the LXDE environment in which case it correctly runs my email client software (Claws Mail).

First, check to see which email client is associated on your system with a mailto link by running:

xdg-mime query default "x-scheme-handler/mailto" 

By default (and I am not sure why) this command returns the following on my system: 

thunderbird.desktop 

By adding the line

x-scheme-handler/mailto=claws-mail.desktop; 
#or thunderbird.desktop etc

to the file

 ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list 

the xdg-mime command shown above now returns

claws-mail.desktop;

Next, it is necessary to force the /usr/bin/xdg-email script to think we are using the LXDE DE (you have to do this as superuser and it is wise to make a backup copy of the script). The script will then check mimeapps.list to see which email client is being used.

Within the  detect_DE()  function (line 412 in my version) replace all of the following code with just DE=lxde;

    if [ -n "${XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP}" ]; then
      case "${XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP}" in
         # only recently added to menu-spec, pre-spec X- still in use
         Cinnamon|X-Cinnamon)
           DE=cinnamon;
           ;;
         ENLIGHTENMENT)
           DE=enlightenment;
           ;;
         # GNOME, GNOME-Classic:GNOME, or GNOME-Flashback:GNOME
         GNOME*)
           DE=gnome;
           ;;
         KDE)
           DE=kde;
           ;;
         LXDE)
           DE=lxde;
           ;;
         MATE)
           DE=mate;
           ;;
         XFCE)
           DE=xfce
           ;;
         X-Generic)
           DE=generic
           ;;
      esac

    fi

Now run xdg-mail in a terminal window which should run up your email client software instead of an empty browser window. 

In my case the revised xdg-mail script also works under the desktop environments such as KDE and LXDE.  However, to note this is a workaround for dwm users so it might cause the script to fail in another DE.

Review of the Panasonic Viera TX-40DX700B

This Panasonic TX-40DX700B is a 4K and HDR 40" TV.

• I agree with many of the reviews that this TV has an excellent picture both for DVB broadcasts and content received over the Internet such as Amazon video. 4K content, although limited at the moment, looks great
• Despite being 89.5 cm in width, the arrangement of the legs usefully enables the TV to be placed on a stand which is not so wide. It will actually fit on an 80cm stand (just) although I'd advise a slightly wider stand. To note the legs cannot be moved towards the centre of the 40" TV, unlike the larger models.  
• The TV worked fine at the outset then it became impossible to access any live broadcasts. Pulling out the plug to reset the TV resolved this. This issue hasn't reoccurred
• The TV incorporates a DLNA client in order to render content stored on a DLNA server. Bear in mind that the media server must be DLNA-compliant not just UPNP-compliant. DLNA is fussier than UPNP but I find the DLNA client on this TV reasonably flexible in terms of playing media formats (obviously not as flexible as media player like mplayer). However, see below regarding photos 
• Some observations about DLNA servers
• For users of the open source DVR Mythtv, the DLNA client on the TV is compatible with v.0.28 of Mythtv. As a DLNA server, mythtv is useful for browsing and showing TV recordings. However if you want to watch videos, they are all grouped into one directory which not very useful if you have them grouped into sub-directories
•  The TV also works well with minidlna which is good for browsing directories of videos as (unlike mythtv) the directory structure is preserved 
• The media browser includes a slideshow option for photos. This is surprisingly basic since there are no transitions between the photos (such as crossfade) and the music (if selected) is pretty dire. Only JPEGs are supported and I also found a JPEG edited and exported back to JPEG in Gimp would not display ("File not supported", but a further conversion to JPEG in ImageMagick resolves this issue. kodi, which i have running on a Raspberry pi 2 connected to the TV is much better: you can run music in the background, kodi uses decent transitions and Kodi will play a range of image formats
• The Apps interface is slick but the selection of apps quite limited compared with an Android TV (judging by the reviews). Personally I prioritised the picture quality and screen size over the Smart TV functionality

Panasonic Viera TX-40DX700B as a DLNA client rendering content from a Mythtv UPNP server

The Panasonic TX-40DX700B is a 40" 4K/HDR LED smart TV  which includes a DLNA client.

This blog describes a configuration which includes the TV as a renderer and a Raspberry Pi 2 running a UPNP/DLNA media server.

Having received the Panasonic TV, the aim was to replace an HTPC sitting under our old TV with something more minimal while retaining the ability to record programmes using Mythtv and stream them to the TV. While this works well, it  is probably a temporary configuration because an HTPC with mythtv's full functionality provides much greater flexibility than a Smart TV with DLNA.

The TV tuner is a PCTV 290e HD USB tuner which is supported in the Linux kernel. This is connected to a Raspberry Pi 2 running a mythtv backend (v.0.28). Raspbian  Jessie is installed on the Pi 2.

Jessie includes mythtv-light which provides the frontend for mythtv. There are instructions here on how to install and configure it. Debian Jessie does not include the packages for the mythtv backend. It is necessary to add a backports repository to /etc/apt/sources.list e.g.:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main

A useful way to sort out the dependencies for the mythtv backend on the Pi2 is to install Synaptic and then install these run-time dependencies (as described here):

mysql-server-5.6 ntp libicu55 libqt5sql5-mysql mysql-client-5.6

I assume that most if not all the other dependencies for the backend must have been installed by the mythtv-light package. I couldn't find libicu55 in backports and libicu52 is running on the backend. I have not yet had any issues using this earlier version of libicu.

The Pi 2 has to be overlocked in raspi-config in order to receive HD television broadcasts via the PCTV tuner otherwise fast-moving video will be pixellated.

In this configuration, TV broadcasts are stored on a remote PC running Gentoo and a Mythtv frontend. Having installed a mythtv backend on the Pi 2, it automatically runs a UPNP server. As noted in the v.028 release notes DLNA compliance is improved in this version of Mythtv.

The Mythtv DLNA server can be accessed via the Devices menu on the Panasonic TX-40DX700B. The Mythtv UPNP server displays the friendly file name and includes menus by channel, recording time etc. A minidlna server is more convenient for videos if you have them arranged in folders because minidlna preserves the folder list whereas Mythtv displays all videos in a single list.

I am not transcoding any of the recordings on Mythtv and it is useful that the Panasonic TV can handle Mythtv's native recording format. Many but not all videos stored in my Mythtv videos directory also played on the TV with navigation including videos in .avi, .mpg and .mp4 format. As expected, not everything was compatible with the TV's DLNA client and some transcoding will be necessary.

For users of Mythtv, my recommendation would (if possible) be to retain the use of the Mythtv frontend rather than to rely entirely on a smart TV. Mythtv accepts a huge range of formats and I find the menus a bit less clunky than the DLNA interface. However there is additional cost involved in having two video renderers feeding the same display device. The costs could be kept to a minimum by using a single board computer for the frontend, perhaps dedicated to it. In my experience, the Pi isn't powerful enough to run a frontend and backend at the same time although it does an amazing job of running the backend which I can access and configure remotely. It is also possible to standard definition  live TV on the remote frontend, HD is a bit laggy using this configuration. I have yet to try the Pi 3but this is an obvious candidate for a  mythtv frontend or backend.

HP Envy 7640 printer under Linux: review and tips

This printer works well under Linux.

I found that the HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) didn't find the printer automatically but with an Ethernet connection it was only necessary to tell HPLIP the internet address. The printer/scanner was then ready to use.

The printer requires a properly configured Ethernet connection if you are using a wired network setup. Otherwise the printer might not wake up from sleep mode even if you press the front panel to activate it. For some reason I found that a connection through a switch to a router caused this issue but a direct connection to the router was fine.

Xsane works well, in addition to flatbed scanning you can carry out multipage scanning using the document feeder.

There is a useful, configurable HP Web interface to the printer with options to scan, configure settings, view usage statistics etc. Sometimes, but not always, I find that accessing the Web interface causes the HPLIP interface to freeze, and you have to close down the Web interface to access the HPLIP interface again. I also found that Firefox displayed blank PDF pages after scanning via the Web interface. A message is displayed: "This PDF document might not be displayed correctly". Clicking on the Firefox button  Open with a different viewer and then choosing Evince resolved this for me.

Certain actions like aligning the printer and cleaning the cartridges can't apparently be carried out by using HPLIP or the Web interface, you have to
use the front panel of the printer.





        

Amazon video under Linux

Amazon video now works great under Linux. Once Amazon had rolled out an HMTL5 player it was no longer necessary to spend time on workarounds because there was no Linux version of Silverlight. Of course Google Chrome is a necessity, other browsers can't be used.

There seems to be a compatibility issue with running the Amazon player under Gnome 3, a distracting white border appears down the right hand side of the screen and along the bottom. Using a window manager (like the excellent Openbox) solves this.

Another quirk is that the mouse pointer doesn't disappear automatically when using a window manager. Right clicking solves this although you have to wait for the player overlay ("Options", volume control etc.) to fade out.