Friday 20 August 2010

smart computer or what?

After my problems caused by my injudicious running of Computer Janitor that removed OpenOffice and I don't know what else, I have been having problems getting my old parallel printer reinstated. I have installed hplip, uninstalled it, installed an earlier version, and finally managed to do a manual install that gave me the capability of adding parallel devices. Then I had the problem that the program couldn't find any printers to install, even though the printer database was there. It wouldn't give me any printers to select. That's taken me a week of my free time.

Finally I gave up and from the Hplip pages, decided to install cups. Did that – apt-get install cups. And then to configure a printer via cups I had to browse to localhost:631, where I found the printer already existing. What the heck?

I went back to the hp-setup program and lo-and-behold, The printer showed up. It was there!

I wondered how to get back the capability of printing to a PDF, so googled that and then installed cups-pdf. Didn't bother with the remaining command to install this as a printer device, but went to the document where I was logging my notes, and vazoom- I had both printers, the Laserjet and the pdf.

Is this intelligent computing? Or just that computer janitor did not clean up everything when it deleted stuff?

I don't care. I have it back.

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