Author: michael_6s9vt64z

I wanted to use my Brother QL-550 printer with Linux. I am running Fedora 26. I found that I could print pn the DK-11201 media (29mm x 90mm) using the glabels-3 utility (install it with dnf), however, I could not get the 38mm x 90mm media working using the CUPS driver which you will find at /etc/cups/ppd/QL-550.ppd.

To fix the problem, I edited the line in the QL-550.ppd file which was originally :-

*DefaultPageSize: 29×90

and I changed it to :-

*DefaultPageSize: 38×90

Now it works fine with the DK-11208 media of 38mm x 90mm
You can also do this by going into cups (localhost:631) and setting the
media type to 38mm X 90mm. If media type does not match the
media (tape size) in the QL-550, it won’t print, and the light will flash green.

I found that it also works nicely as a network printer when connected to my Fritz Box router’s USB port.

This is an interesting page regarding the QL-550 :-

https://blog.philippklaus.de/2015/09/brother-p-touch-ql-500-bw

After setting up the printer, you need to go into the printer configuration page and select the label size (gnome-control-centre->printers->Brother-QL550->Printing Options->Media size

—— Update ——-

After playing around trying to get glabels-3 working with 62mm tape, I finally succeeded. To do so, do the following.

1) Download the driver from the Brother web site and install as root :-
rpm -ihv –nodeps ql550cupswrapper-1.0.1-0.i386.rpm

2) Open cups (https://localhost:631 and navigate to printer setup. Go to “Administration” for the QL-550 and set default options to 62mm tape.

3) Open glabels-3 and create a custom page size.

Select “Page Size”=other, width=100mm, height=62mm
Shape is rectangular. Use defaults for everything else.

Now you can print on tape.

It seems that to switch sizes, you must go into printer administration under localhost:631 and change the paper size in the administration page. The printer does not report the paper size that is loaded to the CUPS driver.

 

To increase the disk size on my Centos 6 virtual machine, I followed these steps.

1. Close down the virtual machine.
2. Right click on the machine, go to Edit Virtual Machine Settings, Select the Hard Disk, click on “Expand Disk” on the right hand side, increase the size and click “Expand”. This makes the disk bigger, but does not change the partition size.
3. Download https://10gbps-io.dl.sourceforge.net/project/gparted/gparted-live-stable/0.30.0-1/gparted-live-0.30.0-1-amd64.iso or the latest version.
4. Select the virtual machine by right clicking on the machine and select “Edit virtual machine settings”. In the CD/DVD section, select “Use ISO image” and select the image from step (3).
5. Now start the machine by clicking on VM->Power->Power_On_To_Firmware
6. The PhoenixBIOS will pop up. Select the “Boot” section, and move to “CD-Rom Drive” and click the “+” to bring it to the top of the list.
7. Press F10 to boot. You should now start up gparted. Resize your partition.
8. Undo step (6)
9. Reboot your machine and enjoy your resized disk.

I found that after doing an upgrade rather than a fresh install, of Fedora 26 with XFCE, the NetworkManger applet was sometimes delay appearing and sometimes unresponsive. This is down to the notifications system not working.

If you try the notifications system, you should see a pop-up appearing with the words “Test Message” if you send this as a normal user :-

notify-send Test “Test Message”

If this does not work, you may be suffering from this issue.

It turns out that if you look in the directory /usr/share/dbus-1/services/,
you will see two dbus notifications, one for KDE and one for XFCE, and these are conflicting with each other. The fix is to remove the KDE notification and leave the XFCE notification

Leave this :-

/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.xfce4-notifyd.Notifications.service

Remove this :-

/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.plasma.Notifications.service

Restart your session and you will find that the notifications now work, and that the NetworkManager applet is responsive.

When upgrading from Fedora 24 to Fedora 26, I found that vmware 12 would not work. To make it work, I had to upgrade to vmware 14, but still, there were problems. I found that I had a message warning that the host machine was running out of memory can could not start the virtual machine. My laptop has 64GB of RAM and the VM only needs 8GB, so something was wrong.

The host machine is running Fedora 24. As usual, with VMWare and Fedora, it is necessary to hack the vmmon and vmnet files in /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source.

To fix, do the following

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
git clone -b workstation-14.0.0 https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules
login as root.
cd vmware-host-modules
cp -r vmmon-only /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
cp -r vmnet-only /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
vmware-modconfig –console –install-all
restart the machine.

The problem should now be solved.

 

I upgraded my Fedora 24 machine to Fedora 26 using the dnf utility, copied the disk to an SSD and then put the SSD into a new laptop. It worked well, except that there was no sound when I had finished. I traced this to pulseaudio not starting. To disgnose the problem, run pulseaudio in verbose mode. It showed that  the sound card was different in the new machine. fix the problem, remove the pulse directory and restart :-

rm -rf ~/.config/pulse