Through the years of my learning to use Linux, it has always been majorly for programming. And maybe a few typing here and there. Using it for printing for the first time was a nightmare some years ago because of a printing experience where my report assignment was messed up because the .odt format I saved it in using Libreoffice, was not supported by the printing Operator’s system – this was of course windows 7. I had to copy the text to MS Word and reformat it (in hell of some time), before I lost some marks. So I never bordered trying to print in Libreoffice .odt file format.
Not too recently I was asked by a friend to help him do some printing, using his HP Deskjet 1000- JT100 series. Since I had an awful experience the last time I combined Linux and printing, I didn’t even entertain a byte of thought to do it again. So I fired up my laptop with win7 on it, to just do it once and easy, and be done with it. Little did I know I would be at it all day long? It started with “device driver not found” continually howling on the taskbar notification tray – anyway if you are familiar window this is what you would have lived with for all time. So I went to HP’s website to download the driver for the printer and installed it. After this the system still couldn’t recognize the printer. Whatttttttttt! I didn’t have the guts to tell my friend that I have not printed his work yet – which would be collected in 2 hours. Out of a frustrated hour of tinkering, an idea just came for me to try it in Ubuntu. I booted my Linux PC with Ubuntu, copied the file from win7 on a thumb drive to Ubuntu. I connected the printer it worked like magic (at least at that time) and straight away I started printing – wow. No configuration, no driver download, NOTHING, NADA – just like that! From that day I was confident that with Linux printing with any machine would be a piece of cake.
Later (with the usual curiosity) I went back to the win7 machine to try and figure out what really happened since I was no longer under the pressure of a deadline. After many trial and errors I found out that I had to delete the installation software prior the installation of the HP driver in the windows device and printer manager – and then reinstall them. This worked and the system started recognizing the printer. Whoops! At least I can now print with both windows and Linux – yeah killing two birds with a stone.
But when I restarted the windows machine, it was a return to ground zero – I had to delete the driver and printer software; and reinstall every time I want to do some printing – which I would never do of course.
I guess one of the birds came back to life, at least I was very happy it wasn’t the one that relates to Linux.
Happy Linux’NG
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