Installing MythTV and Brother HL-2230 Laser Printer on PCLOS 2016

I want to share with you my thoughts, good and bad points, problems I had with installing MythTV, and the Brother HL-2230 Laser Printer on PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) 2016. I'll also include step by step fixes it took me to resolve these two issues.

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Installation

First, I have been using PCLinuxOS since the version 0.9 days all the way up to 2014.  I had also been a Slackware Guru from version 7 to 10. Loved both OS's. So now I'll be installing PCLinuxOS 2016 MATE.

The Live CD worked 100%, no problems. Love the new look. However, I did not care for the colour themes and dark menus. So, to fix that, I right click on desktop and select Change Desktop Wallpaper. There I click on Themes tab. I selected "Traditional". Ahh, much better, now it's a nice light blue with off white windows. Now the menus display nice warm white with black text.

Fonts may be too small for some, that's an easy fix. Click on Fonts tab and change the size from 10 to 11 or 12, depending on how large you want your fonts to be. The next thing was to make sure PCLOS is fully up to date. So, open Synaptic, enter your root password and then click "Reload".  This will download the new repository list and list all the updated stuff. Next, click "Mark All Upgrades" and then click "Apply" This is a must before anything else.

Now the fun part. Well, not for me, but!

Getting MythTV to work in PCLOS

Trust me this was no fun, and I almost gave up. I opened Synaptic, searched for MythTV and installed all RPM's it lists. When finished, this happens: MySQL server errors 1 through 5, complaining a bunch of stuff is missing. Clicked Yes to install missing drivers and it finished.

I ran MythTV setup and so far so good. Filled in local IP's and user names, and then closed the window. Here's where I almost lost it. I ran MythTV frontend and the error message happened: the user name and password are wrong. In order to fix this, I opened a terminal and did the following as root:

# mysql -u root mysql
mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('mythtv') WHERE user='mythtv';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Now password and user name are changed to mythtv

Reboot and run MythTV again. This time I got a new error: unable to connect to master server. No matter what IP I use using Netstat and ipconfig, I could not resolve this. I opened a terminal and did the following:

pclos>su
pclos>password ******
pclos>mythtv-setup

As the back end server loads up I noticed in the debug data why the front end wasn't working. I got connection refused 127.0.0.1:6543.

In order to fix this, you need to first make sure MythTV and MySQL are added to your user and user group.

To do this go to desktop / Start menu / System / Control Center. Then click, Configure Your Computer / System / Manage Users on System. You want to double click your user name and check mark MySQL and MythTV, also do this for Groups.

After I rebooted computer, same error again, did a bug trace and saw this time it was IP 127.0.0.1 not found. Ah, getting somewhere now. So to fix this, open MythTV setup / General. At the top there's IPv4 127.0.0.1. Click on the drop down menu and select a local network IP. On mine it was 10.0.2.15. I closed, logged out and back in, and it worked.

By the way, this took over an hour, but it worked.

Next was getting my printer to work.

Getting Brother HL-2230+ Laser Printer to work

I have the Brother HL-2230+ Laser Printer and want to use it in my system. To do so, go to Brother web site and download the latest RPM's. They look like this:

cupswrapperHL2240-2.0.4-2.i386.rpm
hl2240lpr-2.1.0-1.i386.rpm

Version numbers may vary. Get your terminal on folks, because it's hands on here. For one, you'll need additional packages installed because these are 32bit drivers and will not work unless you install 386 emulated drivers.

Open Synaptic and search for ia32­libs. Install it and then look for dpkg.  If you can't find it open a terminal, become Super User, and type in the following:

apt-get install dpkg

You need this in order to force the ia32 drivers in a 64 bit OS. Once installed, then go into your Downloads folder and list the files there:

cd ~/Downloads/Brother
ls

You should see both hl2240lpr-2.1.0-1.i386.rpm and cupswrapperHL2240-2.0.4-2.i386.rpm.

Now in terminal you type:

rpm -ivh hl2240lpr-2.1.0-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh cupswrapperHL2240-2.0.4-2.i386.rpm

If you get an error, then include the full path to the driver.

If no errors, your good. Then next I open up printers, and there it was, my HL-2230. And it worked.

So much for a short review. But if you encounter any of these two problems like I did, I hope this helps you. Other then that, Love this new PCLOS 2016 MATE and recommend you try it.

4 Good and 4 Bad and 1 Ugly

The GOOD:

• It's fast
• Works great on older laptops
• Uses just under 400 megs
• Allows you to make it your own.

The BAD:

• Ugly default theme
• Hard to see menus, unless you change themes, then looks better
• MythTV and Brother printers don't work out of box
• The way PCLOS formats the drive.

The UGLY:

• For the advanced users, before installing, just select to partition yourself and make your mount partitions, that is "forward slash," and make a cache file 4 GBs towards the end. If your like me, a games and utilities junkie, that default root partition gets filled fast, so use your own partitions.

Hope you enjoyed now that I scared you away. Haha. Just kidding.

Thanks for reading... ( ^-^)

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This is a guest post by Tsukino Usagi