As it turned out, it didn’t work at all. The function is supposed to be for Windows only. However, the clever lads over at bchemnet.com reverse engineered the protocol that was used between the scanner and a windows PC and managed to hack a script together which runs as a server daemon. It just sits there twiddling its thumbs until a user presses the “Scan to PC” button on the printer/scanner. Then it kicks into action and uses sane to send scan commands to the scanner. The result of it is that the scan lands in $HOME/Scans/ – thus, the Scan To PC function is neatly implemented for Linux. There are, of course, rough edges (such as the scanner sending in RAW rather than JPEG) but nothing that couldn’t be fixed in a hackweek.

So where can you get it? The package is available at http://software.opensuse.org/package/python-samsungScannerServer – but you’ll need to install the Samsung Unified Driver for Linux first. I found it at http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/CLX-3305FN but apparently bchemnet.com has a repo for debian/ubuntu where you can download it too. Once you install that and my package, you’ll probably have to do a systemctl start samsungScannerServer (“probably” because I don’t really know how systemd worked and schustered together a .service file based on google search results).

Another nice hackweek project would be to use something like inotify to discover incoming scanned files, gpg to encrypt them and email them to the user (and then delete the unencrypted version). I also need to look into getting the unified samsung driver working on ARM so I can use my raspberry as a scan server which sends encrypted scans to my email address…

Screenshot of TurboGears 2

It’s been quite a while since I last posted an update on the state of python-turbogears in the openSUSE build service. The TurboGears project currently has three branches open (which seems to cause more confusion that actually help people) – the 1.0 branch, the 1.1 branch and the 2.0 branch. Whereas newcomers are advised to install from the 1.0 branch and to develop web applications based on that branch, the truth is that most of the active development goes on in the 2.0 branch. TurboGears 2.0 is at beta7 stage right now – features are frozen and a release data is in sight for the big 2.0.

Without getting into the major differences between 1.0 and 2.0, many people on the TurboGears Google Group have expressed the opinion that the 2.0 branch, despite its beta suffix, is exceptionally stable and well suited to production deployment. One of the major obstacles facing people was how to actually install it. Because it requires some cutting edge packages which might not be standard fare for many distributions, it is recommended to install TurboGears2 (beta) in a virtual python environment using the virtualenv package. Once the new virtual environment is ready and activated, a simple easy_install will automatically install the TurboGears2 package and its requirements. This is well documented.

I got a bit fed up with the virtual environment setup – it worked fairly well, but I was constantly having to set up completely new virtual environments just to install another TurboGears web application. There is an option when using virtualenv, to make the entire virtual environment “mobile” (meaning that you can pack virtual environment plus web app off to another computer easily), but it wasn’t working for me.

Enter python-TurboGears2 on the openSUSE build service. It took me a couple of days to get all the dependencies in the correct versions and installing properly, but it looks as if it works now. As TurboGears2 will be in a more or less constant state of flux until the final 2.0 release, there will probably be quite a lot of work to do to keep the packages up to date, but it’s worth it for the simple zypper in python-TurboGears2 What I want to do now is to try creating a SUSE Studio based virtual appliance – that way practically any web app could be created and setup easily – and with a bit of elbow grease you could probably use apparmor etc to make it rock solid.

PS: it would be well cool if people would test the package

%{__python} setup.py install –prefix=%{_prefix} –root=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT –record-rpm=INSTALLED_FILES

Once I fixed this for python-turbogears and it’s dependent packages (the solution is to replace –record with –record-rpm), I was able to get version 1.0.6 building for Factory. There were a few other issues which needed to be resolved (some deprecated def as() functions in python-peak and python-ruledispatch were causing syntax errors on python 2.6 – because ‘as’ is a reserved keyword), but finally I got it sorted out.

Once python 1.0.6 was successfully building on Factory, I decided to update the package to the most recent stable version of the 1.0.x package line from http://www.turbogears.org – 1.0.7. I had to rewrite the infamous cherrypy2 patch for 1.0.7 and also had to update the python-elixir package (the older 0.5 Elixir was incompatible with python-sqlalchemy >= 5) but now it builds properly.
You can now download and install python-turbogears using:

zypper in python-turbogears

(if you have the devel:languages:python repository, of course).

Thanks to Peter Poeml for his help packaging and fixing bugs.