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

From time to time a new version of printme gets created, but the OS that Macland is using to test the Macs can not update in the same way as normal Build. These steps below will allow you to replace the old printme with a 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, copy the downloaded printme file and set the permissions:

$sudo mv /usr/bin/printme /usr/bin/printme.old
$sudo cp ~/Downloads/printme /usr/bin/printme
$sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/printme

Now you are ready to run printme again!

Mac Netboot Printme

If the netbooted version of printme is not up to date, one of the Technocrats will need to run update-printmes.sh on gerald.