Well my old Epson photo 680’s inkjet head had become so gunged up no matter what I did it wouldn’t clear. So a few months ago I recycled it and bought this nice new epson wireless combi.
After a few months of use this printer is fantastic.
- It’s wireless so can be anywhere in the house with only a mains plug needed
- It has a built in scanner that allows me to scan on any computer, just drop the item you want scanned in.
- It has 2 trays, 1 for A4 paper and the other for small photo paper
- It has a screen and ports for media cards
- I also bought the duplexer unit for the back.
It’s great that I can print photos straight to photo paper and put it in my album. Also printing normal pages I’m saving loads of money with the duplex unit ( that only cost an extra £20 ).
All the print cartridges are seperate so easy to replace.
All in all a good printer, bit expensive but definately worth it.
Over the last wee while I have been running this server on the Intel Dual Core Atom D945GCLF2 board, replacing my old via EPIA 9000 motherboard.
Overall the performance and usability have been fantastic. I’ve installed Centos 5 on the board and carry out updates as they happen.
The only problem I have come across is the network driver. The board has a RealTek 8111c chip on board which is not stable with the stock kernel supplied.
The solution for this is to pull down the latest driver from the realtek web site.
At this present moment this is r8168-8.014.00, installing the driver is extremely simple using the following commands :
Unpack the tarball :
# tar vjxf r8168-8.aaa.bb.tar.bz2
Change to the directory:
# cd r8168-8.aaa.bb
If you are running the target kernel, then you should be able to do :
# make clean modules (as root or with sudo)
# make install
# depmod -a
# modprobe r8168
You can check whether the driver is loaded by using following commands.
# lsmod | grep r8168
# ifconfig -a
The only modification I made was to the modprobe.conf file by ensuring that the alisas for eth0 pointed to the new driver.
All you need is the line
alias eth0 r8168
After that all network activity is extremely stable 🙂
