I'm not a fanatic about operating systems so this is a fairly unbiased story. Our Fuji/Xerox network printer failed last month during a weekend. It was an electronic problem and as it was way out of warranty probably not worth fixing. I liked it as it was very economic to run and it had a built in LAN port and print server.

I dragged out our old LaserJet 1150. We had retired this when a print server unit had failed and bought the Fuji instead. The LJ had parallel and USB ports so I found a printer cable and hung it off one of the Windows XP boxes. Took about an hour struggling with the HP install disk and Windows printer setup, but then all the network computers had access to it.

Problem was it wasn't in the ideal place. I would much rather it was located over by a group of Linux boxes where the Fuji used to sit. I had a file server, a test web server and another Ubuntu Linux box with a desktop interface I use for torrents. Suspecting this was going to be hard as my knowledge of Linux is low I Googled a how to question. I got pointed to an internal Linux routine I could access with a web browser so I used the torrent machine.

Five minutes to install the printer and another couple of minutes per each network computer to see it and all done. I beginning to like this Linux thing.