New workspace

Or rather a renewed one. I've spent the last day migrating my laptop from Win XP to Kubuntu Linux. There were a few mishaps, mostly a result of my not having touched a Unix system these last two years, and one major one resulting from brain dead information.

After spending a couple of hours clicking right and left, watching in fascination how everything went up like a breeze with little or no problems, I was left with convincing my laptop to communicate with our networked printer. That might seem like a minor issue, but I write for pleasure, my dream of authorship and mandatory assignments alike. Being unable to convert digital data to paper is therefore a rather major dilemma.

Enter brain dead. After scouring the web for information and installing all kinds of defunct software as well as redundant, but perfectly working, ones I ended up with the knowledge that I was supposed to point my web browser to my own laptop in order to get to an installation interface. Now, the interface was by no means difficult to use -- if you knew beforehand what you were supposed to do. This was later proven by the five minutes I needed to add printing capacity to another laptop. Of course it helped that I am more than a little bit familiar with computer networks and therefore no stranger to force the necessary information out of a router, after which identifying the printer server became a lot easier. Static IP on said server and I knew I would not have to hunt the printer down like an elusive prey every time the DHCP server decided to assign a new address to it. Opening a socket to a remote unit is also something I have done quite a few times, which ended up, implicitly giving me the correct protocol, and I was set to go.

Now, what in all bleeding hells would have been so difficult about making a small setup software that scanned the local network for potential networked printers? After all, all other magic with the installation, some of which I had never expected to see working, worked like a dream.

Brain dead!

End rant.