Call for testers: pmount finally supports mounting image files

I've finally come up with a decent way for pmount to support mounting image files using loop devices. This has required a little more work than I thought, since I had to add support for configuration files for pmount, as loopback mounting is by essence insecure, so the support for it had to be user-configurable. I have tried hard to make the loopback mounting as secure as possible, for instance by ensuring that a user cannot bypass file permissions with it, but of course lookback mount still means that a user has read-write access to a mounted FS which can be used to exploit potential weaknesses in the kernel...

I have uploaded a new version of pmount to experimental. Comments, bug reports, exploits are welcome !

Installing a Canon Pixma MP250

I recently acquired a Pixma MP 250 printer, and as I had some difficulties with setting it up, I wanted to share this here. The printer isn't supported as such by CUPS, so I had to dig a little bit. After quite some time, I found debian packages on the Canon website there. Don't fear the mention of i386, amd64 packages are included too. This link is likely to break when the software is upgraded, you should try your luck in the drivers search page should that happen (or for other models). After installing that, CUPS find the connected printer and proposes the PPD for it. The scanner works out of the box with xsane

As a side note, Canon also provides source for the debian packages (the packaged was ITPed ages ago). However, there are some binary-only blobs and I didn't manage to get it to compile from source.