Service Discovery

Service discovery refers to the process of getting additional information about resources in a distributed (e.g. networked) system. iPhones are particularly dependent on service discovery. This blog concerns the process of discovering services (specifically remote printer sevices) and IP addresses (e.g name service) and the various ways this can be done.

<Short digression>:

IP network messages can be sent in one of three ways,...

Heterogenous Networks with Heterogeneous Printers

This blog describes the process of building a modest home network involving multiple printers and computers with different operating systems, using consumer-level equipment.

The priority objective was to be able to print on all printers from all computers.
A secondary objective was to concentrate the maintainable software in one place, so that if new printers or computers were added, only the new equipment needed...

It seems that several packages in 14.1 are not quite ready for prime time.

upower doesn't deal with the rearrangement of usb-hid devices in /sys/class. The problem is in the udev files in the package, not the code. The latest source on the web is OK, but the slackpkg is a couple of revisions older.

GTK-3 doesn't draw non-sensitive buttons correctly.

But the biggest problem seems to be with the new (version 14) xorg-server. There was a big push for xcb...

After fruitless attempts to get the MSI wireless dongle (comes with the Intel motherboard) to work, I bought a Hawking Wireless 150N wireless adapter. Still USB, but it has an external antenna and an amplifier. It worked better, but the problem with staying connected remained. It uses the same Ralink 2870 chip as the MSI adapter. Finally, I tried the "bleeding edge" wireless drivers in compat-wireless-2.6 (latest version). Although not all the drivers in the package will compile on my...

When XWindows was ported to 64 bit architectures, the decision was made (probably for legacy compatibility) not to add a 64 bit data format to routines that return overloaded pointers, specifically XGetWindowProperties. Pointers, which are 64 bits, are returned in 64 bit elements that are claimed to be 32 bits. There is no way to cope with this in user code, except to check which architecture you are running on. The compiler define "__x86_64" is set on Intel 64 bit compilers. wmctrl (not...