Kikkoman

If you’re running any of the rpm based Linux distros, you should really check out RedCarpet by Ximian. Its basically like Windows Update for Linux. Eg, looks at what RPM’s you have and what RPMs have been updated. Gives you a nice gui to select them and then downloads and installs them.

For more and better info go here .

Anyways, back to the story. Recently on several FC1 boxes, I haven’t been able to run RedCarpet as rcd looses it and starts eating all the cpu. Eventually tracked it down to OpenCarpet. It seems like rcd goes into an endless loop trying to retrieve data from open-carpet.org. So how to fix it?

Remove open-carpet.org references from the rcd config file. /var/lib/rcd/services.xml

So that gets rcd and RedCarpet running again, unfortunately I now don’t have a solution for getting updated rpms, other than running the dog slow RedHat updater.

Update: OpenCarpet now seems to be fine on my home dev box. Will see what happens tomorrow with the FC1 boxes at work.

There are 4 things going for this scanner.

1. Its cheap ($50)
2. Its small
3. Its powered via the USB (no wall wart power cord)
4. Its got Mac (manufacturer) and Linux (not manufacturer) support.

Good stuff. However the Windows/Mac software that is provided is less that ideal.

1. It doesn’t let you do a “preview” scan. Eg I threw something on the scanner, do a quick very lo rez scan, and then let me use the mouse to select part of the picture I really want to scan. The scanning tools under linux do that.
2. It insists on “linking” to something. On windows it “links” to the AcDeeSee wanna-be software that it comes with. Eg, after the scan is done, it hands the picture over to somebody else to display. So on the Mac you will probably want to link it to the Preview app.
3. The Linux support is no _all_ there yet. Yes you can scan, but the the colors are off. This is on Fedora Core 1. Supposedly, the latest greatest SANE has color calibration routines, so I will try fiddling with those.