Computer woes

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been working on family calendars again for my family. They run February thru January so I can work on them after the Christmas rush each year during January which is usually fairly uneventful. Being that my husband works with computers, we have several around the house. The computer that I usually work on is an older Macintosh and really my only complaint is that it is old and getting slower every day it seems. The other problem with the computer is that the printer drivers for our printer are not very good. For the most part I can print just fine from the Mac to our printer, but with the high quality photo pages that I need for the calendar, I prefer to use the computer downstairs in my husband's office.

My husband is very anti-Microsoft and he tries to do everything possible to avoid using Microsoft products. My husband's computer runs FreeBSD and all of the open source freeware he can find. One of the problems with this is that to get things to work the way you want them to takes a lot more time and effort. One thing that we haven't gotten working quite right from the FreeBSD computer is the printer. We can print from it, but usually the margins are off and it's hard to get it the way you want. Our FreeBSD computer used to be setup to dual boot on either FreeBSD or Windows if you needed it. Since I printed the calendars last year my husband did away with the dual boot and thus Windows - he did find a Windows Emulator for FreeBSD though so if we absolutely need to use Windows we can. I have some Windows software that I have used for printing my calendars each year and with the unsurety of printing in FreeBSD my husband agreed to help me set the software up with the Windows Emulator.

So, things were working just fine and on Saturday I got a lot of the printing done - probably a little over half. Then I didn't work on it on Sunday, but my husband got the computer set up so it would be easier for me to run the windows emulator. So Monday morning my husband told me that I should be all set for printing that day. Well, after he left for work I went downstairs, launched the windows emulator and couldn't contact the server where my files are located. At first I thought it was just a windows problem but then I couldn't access the internet from FreeBSD either - yet the Mac could do it just fine. I called my husband at work and he had me try a few things, but no success. It turns out that while my husband was getting things working for me for printing, he was also updating and building a lot of other things on the FreeBSD box and as of right now things are still not up and running. So my calendars that I wanted to have finished today so I could mail out tomorrow are still only halfway done...

And then they still need to be bound and hole-punched...

Hopefully he will have more success tonight...