For some reason, on Fedora 15, CUPS wasn't starting on bootup. Print jobs were just being silently dropped. I tried this:

$ **lpq** lpq: Unable to connect to server.

Hmm... That's not right.

$ **sudo service cups start** Redirecting to /bin/systemctl start cups.service

Oh... they changed the administration command for some reason. I couldn't find anywhere in the menus (or the discombubulated, disorganized mess that substitutes for menus in Gnome 3) a GUI for selecting startup services. Didn't we have that back in RedHat 4? Anyway... a little digging uncovers that the simple service command, inexplicably, has been replaced by the more jargon-laden systemctl command, so the 'new' way is now:

$ **sudo systemctl start cups.service**

OK that got it going. lpq sees CUPS and print jobs actually print. Now to change it permanently:

$ <strong>sudo chkconfig --list</strong>

Note: This output shows SysV services only and does not include native
systemd services. SysV configuration data might be overridden by native
systemd configuration.

iscsi 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
iscsid 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
livesys 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
livesys-late 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
netconsole 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off
netfs 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
network 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off
sandbox 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off
svnserve 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off

Another frustration. This functionality is now rolled into the systemctl command. Perhaps that's nicer, but where's the GUI interface for this? I guess I could use webmin, but gosh it seems Gnome should have one.

Here's what it reports:

$ **systemctl status cups.service** cups.service - CUPS Printing Service Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cups.service; disabled) Active: active (running) since Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:19:58 -0700; 7min ago Main PID: 16104 (cupsd) CGroup: name=systemd:/system/cups.service └ 16104 /usr/sbin/cupsd -f

OK, it's disabled at startup. here goes:

$ **sudo systemctl enable cups.service** ln -s '/lib/systemd/system/cups.service' '/etc/systemd/system/printer.target.wants/cups.service' ln -s '/lib/systemd/system/cups.socket' '/etc/systemd/system/sockets.target.wants/cups.socket' ln -s '/lib/systemd/system/cups.path' '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/cups.path' $

Ah, there we go.

Please, Fedora and Gnome -- where's the GUI administration tools for this?

If you want support for MP3 files, Youtube video, and Java on your webpages, you could hunt down several packages - or just install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package install all the codecs and other files in one step. This also includes Microsoft core fonts.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Eliminate Irritating Update Notifier Pop-Unders

This from Joseph Sinclair

In Ubuntu 9.04, update-notifier doesn't display an icon, it actually runs update-manager full-screen as a "pop-under". It's easy to miss, and there's no way to make it NOT run (so on a laptop, for instance, where stupid useless no-change updates are pending, you'll get the blasted thing running every time you boot, and quite often multiple times in a session).

There is a "magic" command to make it stop and go back to how it used to run (which you may have to run regularly since some updates seem to overwrite it), but it must be run for every user who can run updates:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

Adding that to /etc/bash.bashrc seems to be a quick-and-dirty fix that restores it for every user, and resets it if it gets overwritten. There's no guarantee this will work after the 9.10 update, but at least it works for now.