PDF vs Printers

[Bart Silverstrim]

Jeffrey Tooker wrote:
> I am running Ubuntu 7.10 and the printer is a Lexmark Z31 on a paralell
> cable local to the machine.  
> 
> As I said in my previous post I am fighting my way through getting the
> printer up.  In some ways it is a good thing.  It will help me in learning
> what the system is all about.  It will get me away from Windows point and
> click and not understand what is actually happening in the machine. I am
> finding that Ubuntu is strong.  I have locked it up a number of times in the
> passed few days and had to cut power and restart.  Ubuntu seems to come back
> every time when re booted.  This is giving me confidence to work with my
> decicated Ubuntu machine.  I will not be afraid of locking it up and never
> getting it back.  I am begining to make sense of the file structure and the
> folder names.  With more exposure it will make more sense.
> 
> Jeffrey Tooker 
> Paynes Creek Ca.

Okay...think I got this reformatted correctly.

Jeffrey-in quoting material, I'm not sure how you did it with your mail 
client, but don't put things under a "--".  The usual general "standard" 
is that a single line consisting of -- is preceding a signature line, so 
when I hit "reply" on that message your restating of the situation was 
completely wiped from the reply message.

Second...what are you doing that you're locking up the machine?

While you've had good luck with hard-rebooting, the fact is that no 
computer takes kindly to hard reboots when it's using a r-w filesystem. 
  The only one that could not be really hurt is a system running 
entirely from a liveboot CD, and you're always rolling the dice on 
filesystem corruption when you do that.

I've seen Linux lock up once in awhile, usually from something really 
really odd happening, but more often than not the "lockup" was actually 
the interface frozen, and changing to a virtual terminal or hopping in 
with secure shell to kill an errant process fixed the situation without 
a hard reboot.

If you really want to learn and goof around without hurting your 
installed system (if this is a system you use to also do real work on) 
you might want to concentrate some time on learning how to use VMWare 
Player or Server, and install a sandbox learning system for 
experimenting in.  While you may not learn as much about advanced 
graphics work in that sandbox you can still learn a lot about the OS and 
how it works at other levels without damaging your system.

Good luck with your self-guided study of your new system!

-Bart