PDF vs Printers

[Ioannis Vranos]

Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> 
> 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!

Actually the ext3 filesystem is very hard to mess it, in its default
ordered mode. When he hard-reboots the filesystem is using the journal
to recover to a valid filesystem state. However he may miss data.

I agree that hard-rebooting is very rarely if ever needed, in the
current mature state that Ubuntu and other Linux distributions are.