Brandon’s Mind

Damn printers.

The Hubster didn’t shout at me after all - he wasn’t really bothered because he never uses it, and also he seemed impressed that I’d got the printer working with the desktop, so that’s ok. Nevertheless, I still want the poor old laptop fixed.

Luckily, my brother-in-law is a sys-admin type, so I emailed him, and he replied with some instructions, which I shall follow tomorrow.

The good news is that the printer now works with the desktop with XP on it. It had all sorts of not-workingness going on before, and absolutely refused to work. But, thanks to necessity (see the bad news), I had to get it to work, so a little googling later, I discovered a way that might just fix the damn thing. Luckily, I have a copy of the drivers already downloaded from the Lexmark website - they don’t seem to have them there any more for such old printers as the X75. They just want to brag about their shiny new wireless printers. I followed the instructions, and lo and behold, it worked. I will have to remember to write that up on my tips page so I can do it again, if need be.

The bad news is the reason why I had to unplug the printer from the craptop. Let me explain why I am making such a fuss about unplugging the printer from the craptop: it is because despite it being plug ‘n’ play, if the printer is unplugged from the craptop, it refuses to work when you plug it back in again; you have to uninstall the driver and reinstall it. However, I had no choice about the matter, because I needed to print something off, but I seem to have done something bad to the craptop. It now only wants to run a limited version of GRUB.

Blimey, such a hassle to get Linux to install a printer! It did find the printer and realised what kind it is, but of course it needed a printer driver installing. At least I think that’s why it wouldn’t print anything. It might have just been that it refused to use the cartridges that were in there already of course, because they are ancient and dried out, but it wasn’t giving me any useful hints or clues or tips. It told me absolutely nothing, and didn’t even tell me it wasn’t going to print the test page. It just sat there, as if it was busy sending it to the printer. Such lies!

I decided I must need a printer driver, like you do on Windows. So I went to http://linuxprinting.org/, amd downloaded this gutenprint thing, which promised to work wonderfully well with the printer. After spending ages trying to find some instructions telling me what to do with all these files the archived file unleashed, I followed said instructions, which resulted in it doing all these checks (really, if you ever download and install this stuff, don’t ever tell it to make check because it takes about 17 hours or so to complete. Anyway, when it was done, I told it to install it, as per instructions, which of course failed because it was denied permission to do all this stuff. C said I had to use sudo blah-blah so it would do it as the boss, or some such nonsense.

Not that it worked after that, either. Oh no. That would have been too simple. The installer dialogue box was telling me I needed a PPD and to tell it where it was. Ididn’t know where it was, so I couldn’t tell it. I searched the file system for such a file, but it couldn’t find one. I looked for some more instructions. I found some that told me I needed to update the PPD by typing some stuff, so I did, and it told me it had updated one PPD file (which it still refused to find for me) and that I needed to restart this thing. The instructions said this was system specific. T’rific. I restarted the computer instead.

Still no success at making the thing work. I changed the connection type and everything and it still wouldn’t play. I went out instead. I came back, and looked at it again. I faffed with how it was attached again, then followed the instructions on how to remove the cartridges from the printer, which are handily stuck inside the printer itself. I put them back in again and noticed the on/off light was flashing, so I pressed the on/off button, not noticing it switched off. I sent it a test page then turned it on. It whirred and clicked and whirred and clicked and whirred some more, much more than it did when I turned it on before. It seemed like it was trying to get to the paper I’d put in, but couldn’t quite. I took out all sheets but one, then eventually, it did a big, decided click, and the paper started vanishing into the printer! And it printed faint blue lines across some of the pages, in that test-page sort of manner you get from printers. Fantastic. I bet that’s all it needed in the first place.

All it needs now are some new cartridges.

Now it’s time for a rant. It’s all very well all all these people saying how much better than Windows Linux (or Unix, for that matter) is, but for ease of installation of stuff, Windows wins hands down. If I want to install something on Linux, I have to decide what version I want, what architecture I want, what kind of file I want to download (and these are never just executables that’ll install stuff; first they have to be extracted, then a palaver gone through of making it and then installing it), then I have to work out where it’s supposed to go, and so on and so on. You might be reading this and thinking, yeah, but see how flexible it is? Flexible it might be, but it’s bloody daunting to someone who doesn’t know what’s what. It’s just not intuitive. Why can’t these people who have files for downloading also make available a file that’s similar to what a Windows user might expect. Make it more friendly. Maybe if it was, then more people would make the switch. Rant over.