Getting old

I have decided, I must be getting old.  A grumpy old man, to be precise.

I used to be a HUGE Linux fan (when I left formal employment in 2001 and started freelancing I converted lock, stock and barrel).  Initially I ran SuSE (started with version 9) and later switched to Ubuntu.

I am considering building a second Morgan, and have allocated the wife's old HP laptop to control the printers.  I have re-formatted, making the laptop a dual-boot machine (XP and Ubuntu 10.04).  Unfortunately, the HP does NOT have wi-fi connection, and all internet in our house is wireless.

E-bay will sell me the wi-fi module for ZAR1000 (I don't want it THAT badly), so I spent some time setting up a LAN to the other laptop and sharing that one's internet connection, in order to install all the software I need.

Starting with Pronterface, for I first need to control the printer.  I can slice and visualize and design on the other PC, but Pronterface needs to run on the HP.  So I embark on the journey...  Going directly to the kliment Printrun github page, I start following the instructions (by the way, MacOS and Windows has single, precompiled packages that you download and run).

First hiccup:  pycairo will not set up via pip (according to instructions).  So I read up how to install, and attempt it, leading to the second hiccup:  pycairo requires Python 3, and Ubuntu 10.04 came with Python 2.

Upgrade python (374 MB later) I have the LATEST VERSION OF Python 2.  So now learn how to install Python 3.  Another few hundred MB later...  I also installed Python 3 alongside Python 2, but pycairo doesn't like that.  I changed the first line of the waf script to reflect Python 3.2, but when I configure the build it still complains about python being the wrong version.

Currently I am replacing 2 with 3, but I cannot see this ending well...