I've been fighting with a system for two days now trying to get it to print. So far I have gotten it to print out a test page, but it won't use the filters when printing from a GUI application, like say Firefox. All of that goes through the system as Post Script, and needs to be presented to printers properly in order to be printed out as one would expect it to be. Either that or you get reams of Martian looking symbols spit out onto multiple pages. Not a pretty sight!
This isn't my first day at the rodeo so I know somewhat what is supposed to happen. Anyhow, all of this is occurring on a spare laptop that I have, that I want to keep in the kitchen to just web surf and do the occasional print job. So I don't want to spend a whole lot of time setting it up.
Now with that goal in mind I unwittingly painted myself in a corner by choosing to install Linux Mint onto it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Linux Mint is the most popular Linux distribution going today so how bad can it be? Pretty bad if my recent experiences with it are any indication!
Anyhow, my tale of woe begins with the installation, unless I pick a selection off of the menu in Unetbootin, I can't just use Unetbootin and an ISO to make a flash drive that will actually run the install. From what I've seen the install keeps fixating on the sr0 device, or optical drive, and refuses to look for an image on the flash drive.
Figuring I didn't need the latest, or the greatest I just choose a version off of the menu, I want all of this to be easy remember? Yeah well when it came time to install printer drivers easy got off the bus. I noticed when I tried to update repositories I was getting error messages, as if some of the repositories are inactive today.
OK wiping out that install, burning a DVD, and installing a more current version of Mint fixed that. Now my printer driver I wanted installed, and even printed out a test page. Success!
Ah no, not so fast there hombre. While the test page did in fact print out beautifully the system refuses to use the correct filters when printing jobs. So what I have is useless to me, unless all I want to do is print out test pages. See, the printer works? It just refuses to print out anything useful that I may want it to.
I am just about to have a PC LOAD LETTER Office Space moment over here at this point! To make matters even worse in the course of it all the system has even BSODed on me due to another unrelated bug. BSOD (Black, not Blue) on Linux, yeah I know, completely unacceptable. The gory details of what happened there seem to have something to do with NetworkManager and the WiFi driver module. Something else that I am going to have to sort out if the system is to be acceptable.
Someone remind me why I didn't just install Debian onto this machine? Oh yeah, that's right, I wanted all of this to be easy for a change...
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