ubuntulinux + printer...

Some time back, I gave up on getting ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit) running on this nice-looking amd64 box my buddy gave me. Instead, I ran something like it on an old Dell lease-return. Long story short, I found myself trying the 32-bit version of ubuntu 9.04 on this 64-bit box. It seems more stable; I suspect a defect in the 64-bit-specific agpgart code.

This works quite well for the "generic" case -- I tried partitioning the disk myself, which just put me in a world of hurt. Just use the whole disk and life is good. That was a week or two back, and astonishingly enough today was my first attempt to print.

Printing took a bit of googling and head-scratching, because

System → Administration → Printing 

gave me a window with the "New" button grayed out. Some website advised me to enable CUPS in

System → Administration → Services 

but it was already turned on. Eventually I tried the suggestion shown in this answer, viz., connecting to http://localhost:631/. This gave me a "No can do" sort of message, which

$ netstat -tln

confirmed for me. The answer was simple:

collin@p64:~$ /etc/init.d/cups status
Status of Common Unix Printing System: cupsd is not running but /var/run/cups/cupsd.pid exists.
collin@p64:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/cups start
[sudo] password for collin: 
 * Starting Common Unix Printing System: cupsd                           [ OK ] 
collin@p64:~$ /etc/init.d/cups status
Status of Common Unix Printing System: cupsd is running.

Now port 631 was open, so I went for the gusto and did the System→Administration→Printing; lo and behold, the "New" button was active; the rest was a piece of cake.

Turns out that if I had just scrolled down a bit, this exact answer would have turned up.

Back to taxes now.