Rambling 2014/6 - DOSEMU and the USB-LPT printer

Setup

DOSEMU on a Xubuntu, running an MS-DOS application, that would like to print to LPT1. All fine, but what happens if you don't have a parallel port on that PC?

Details

We happened to have a Xubuntu machine and an old Epson LX-300, but the PC did not have any LPT ports. So the only way to connect them was via an USB-LPT connector. With that inline, the system did see the Epson and printed anything.
However, the old MS-DOS application that runs in DOSEMU did not print anything. In fact, it printed but the bytes did not get to the printer.

Solution

The solution was hacking DOSEMU config (/etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf)
In the section "Printer and parallel port settings" there are several lines of lpr blahblah command, all commented out. Take the first one and edit it to include the name of the printer (you can find it on the CUPS config webpage localhost:631), right after the -P option. So the line now looks like:

$_lpt1 = "lpr -PEpson-LX-300+"

Save it and collect all acknowledgments :)

Rambling 2014/2 - Xubuntu 13.10 & SMB

Today I've installed Xubuntu 13.10 (64bit) on a new machine. All worked fine, but couldn't connect to our server via SMB. That felt quite painful as my home dir was saved on the server :)
After checking all usual things, it still did not work. Then came the solution from googling:

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

That magically made everything work.
Now I wonder - the installer packed a gazillion of smb* packages on the hard disk, why did it not include this tiny one that made the whole stuff work?