Reboots, They’re Not Yet Gone

One of the things I used to tease Windows-using friends with, was the abundancy of reboots needed to get the system running. We all know about the joke that describes the latest Windows error: “Your mouse has moved. Please reboot the system for the changes to take effect.”

Apparantly, we’re not all through with reboots on Linux, either. Tonight (since I couldn’t sleep) I finally fixed our printer. The solution was easy, once I figured it out. The thing was, I was trying too much.

First, I installed Turboprint and tried to use their drivers from the default Ubuntu printing manager. That didn’t work. So I tried it with the TurboPrint console. That didn’t seem to work either. I screwed around with configuration and tried all sorts of things, until I noticed that Turboprint was giving the error “Parallel port busy, will try again in 30 seconds…”. That was it. I needed to reboot for some strange reason to free the parallel port. Just got my first print.

Now to share the printer in the network…