Good gobbledy smack!

I never thought I'd see the day, but I *finally* got my FreeBSD machine working with my HP printer. I've dealt with this problem on and off for so long I don't remember when I started. I've been down lots of rabbit trails too. In the end, the thing that got it to work was gunzipping the ppd file and using it instead of whatever default drivers cups came up with, despite the fact that they matched my printer series. But before I got to that point, I went through lots of other things, correcting errors. I even made my own patch--though now I think it was unneccessary. The one good thing in this I suppose is it finally got me out of the package system and into ports. There are still some packages that I need to get rid of though. Now i understand what nod meant about 'living in ports.'

And even though I'm excited about my progress, I'm not done yet. I can print from the FreeBSD machine, but the goal is to be able to print from anywhere in the house. And then I need to make sure that scanning works too. Maybe I need to buy that VGA card after all. Remote scanning sounds cool, but its probably more practical to scan from the computer that's connected to the scanner.

Back

Okay. Its been awhile, but I'm finally back on the web. I hadn't done any kind of updates an what, a year? But my need to vent motivated me to contact Time Warner and get the web space issues worked out. Roadrunner now offers a user-friendly webspace that doesn't allow FTP--not for people like me. They didn't give me hassle about switching to this space though.

FreeBSD on the other hand, has been a big hassle. I've been wrestling with it for the entire year. Being the lazy person that I am, I made the mistake of not using ports, and downloading packages for all the programs I wanted to run. Now I'm paying for that. My biggest obstacle to date is getting my HP Printer to work. Turns out there was a problem with HPLIP and the specific subset of HP printers that my printer happens to fall into. There's a patch, but in order to patch, I need to compile, which means...ports. I'm still not printing--I'm getting an error that says CUPSEXT could not be loaded. I'm guessing the next step will be to delete the cups package and install the port. I'm also fairly confident that in the not-too-distant future I'll have to remove ALL the packages and replace them with ports. Not looking forward to that.