Printme

Printme is a utility that is used in the build program and in tech support to record various hardware features of the system, and the people who have worked on it, as well as the problems found.

Generating Printme report without a script

There are times when you need to generate a printme report, and do not have freegeek-extras installed e.g.:

• systems built in MacBuild
• system with an unreadable hard drive, but bootable from a live cd

You can still run the report by opening a terminal and entering the following:

lshw -xml >> printme.xml

This will run the lshw command, which will generate its output in XML format and use it to create a file called printme.xml in your current directory.

Once the XML file is created, use a web browser to connect to Free Geek's printme database (NOTE: the database is only accessible from Free Geek's internal network), fill out the relevant information, and upload the XML file. This should provide you with a printme report that can be printed.

Using this system, you can also create a printme.xml on an offsite box and then use a copy of that file to create a printme when you get back to FG.

Finding printme info on a broken machine

Provided the files still exist and you can boot from a liveCD, printme info is located in /var/lib/freegeek-extras/printme/

Mac Printme

• What happened to the update-printme script which was written by one of the volunteers? Is it gone or would it still be useful? (I probably should have gotten my hands on a copy of it at the time..)
  • Anyways, I have replaced the database's response with instructions to see the Printme wiki page now (it mentioned update-printme before), but let me know if you would like it to change again. I have complete control of the text printme outputs in this situation from the database, so we can trivially change the output to be more helpful when we know our processes change.
  • Ryan52 21:36, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

From time to time a new version of printme gets created, because of the OS that Macland is using to test the Macs they can not update in the same manor as Build. These steps below will allow you to move the old printme and replace it with the new version allowing printme to run.

Start by opening up the latest version of printme in a new tab. Save the page in your Downloads folder. (You can also right-click to save the link.)

In Terminal make a backup of the old printme by renaming it:

$sudo mv /usr/bin/printme /usr/bin/printme.old

Now copy the downloaded printme file:

$sudo cp ~/Downloads/printme /usr/bin/printme

Now change the permissions so that the file can be read:

$sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/printme

Now you are ready to run printme again!

This Document in progress JDT Mar 24 2012