One of the delights of switching has been with my printer. That sounds really dumb but it was.

Usually installing my printer is a pain. The reason for this is that it’s an HP 1020 I bought at Circuit City a couple years ago. For whatever reason, I just assumed it would be Mac compatible (I know- what was I thinking?!). To add to that issue, I wanted to plug it into the USB port of the Airport Express on a different floor. The 1020 is not a network printer.

Despite compatibility issues, other Mac users in my situation out there said to use the Mac drivers for 1022 and that would work fine and it did. And the Airport Express USB thing went without a hitch. Printing is easy on my Mac but occasionally it will stall and not find the printer, etc.

I went into the printer configuration in Ubuntu with a little trepidation. I remember some printers having to be set up in strange ways to work. It always seemed to work but you might have to intentionally select the wrong printer. Not so! I went to System > Administration > Printing and clicked the ‘New’ button. It found my printer automatically in moments and the test page printed fine. No stalling.

I spent about an hour trying to install the printer on Vista- still no go.