Project FC5 Update: 0 for 2

Last night, I had two tasks for my FC5 project:

1. Get a Parallels VM machine for Windows XP rolling.Seemed to kick off OK after having to remember how to use Parallels’ VM setup utility. A false start or two later, and the XP installed seemed to start fine. It did all the normal setup stuff, got right to the point where it starts up for the first time and blam Parallels craps out with a kernel panic.

   No biggie. Lemme just restart Parallels and that virtual machine. Doh, unfortunately, I didn’t save the VM profile before I started the XP install. Crap, gonna have to start over. I blew away the VM file and used the wizard to make the profile and was sure to save it before starting the XP install.

   The XP install went pretty uneventfully. After a some time, I was sitting at the XP desktop. Figured it was time to start patching things up with Windows Update. So I started Internet Explorer. Kaboom, Parallels goes down in flames.

   Was too tired to mess with that any more, so I left it alone. Hopefully, I can just fire up Parallels again and restart the VM and pickup where I left off. Not quite sure what I’ll do if Paralllels turns out not to be that reliable.

2. Get Printing Working Locally.Normally, I usually have a windows box that’s my primary machine that has printing capability. This has been working pretty nice; I can share the printer and Sandy can print wirelessly from her laptop in the living room. I’d like to try to have the same arrangement from Linux land. So, step 1 is getting my hp lj1000 to print locally.

   Hmm. Good signs. I went to the printer queue setup applet and the wizard found the printer (connected via USB) and seemed to have drivers for it. Cool.

   So, I try to print a test page. Hmm, nothin’. The printer config gadget asked if the page printed. I said no and it gave a me a tail of the last few lines of the CUPS error log. Something about foomatic-rip terminating abnormally.

   I googled around a bit and found a bunch of folks with similar problems, but none of the solutions they found seemed to help. Gonna take some more messing around to get this figured out I guess.

   One theory is I may have a conflict between Parallels and USB. Parallels has an AutoConnect option for USB which I assume means that when you plug in a device and Parallels is running it forks it over to the VM (rather than the host OS). I had that turned when I was trying to install XP and was goofing around with the printer stuff in the meanwhile. A long shot, but its something to check.