Monday, September 28, 2009

Printers! Printers! Printers!

A very good colleague of mine once said "if you want to be happy, never print"...
Installing a network printer today, reminded me of the trouble. Yes, there are lots of
information available on the web both by printer manufacturers and other parties about
how to get this simple matter achieved. But it often turns out there are some unpredictable difficulties on the way. Without further ado, I will write down the exact steps that helped me to achieve this seemingly simple task.
OS: Windows Xp
  1. First download the printer driver from the manufacturer. I had to download the driver for Canon LBP 5800. Extract the file.
  2. Now comes the tricky part of installing a network port. In printers and faxes window, select Add Printer and select a printer connected to a local port. Do not select check for connected printers because the printer is not actually locally connected to your computer but rather sits on some where inside the network. Yes, this sounds bit strange because why would you try to install a computer in the network "locally" in the first place. The quick answer is you are going to map a network IP to a local port in a short while. Anyway selecting this check box will do no harm other than taking some extra few seconds to check for printers which are anyway not connected to your computer.
  3. Then select create a new port and select standard TCP/IP port. Here you must enter the IP of your printer. Ask the network admin about this piece of info if you do not know this already.
  4. Then proceed to select a driver. Often the driver for your network printer might not be displayed under the list shown by Xp by default. So select have disk and browse to the folder where you extracted the DLL for the driver. 
  5. Now you will be able to print a test page. If everything is fine you will get your first printed page! congrats. If nothing happens or you do not come this far, then good luck for you!!!

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Continuously monitor GPU usage

 For nvidia GPUs do the follwing: nvidia-smi -l 1