On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 16:11, betty wrote: > after being so proud of getting the hp photoprinter to work in > openoffice, i recently unplugged it from the parallel port, plugged in > the laser printer, selected laser printer as the default, printed some > stuff. then when i plugged the color printer back in and re selected it > as default, it will print a test page from OO but not a file. i have > tried what i think is everything, but obviously that is not the answer. > anyone have any experience with the gui and changing printers? maybe > there is a specific order i should have followed in the > unplugging/plugging default sequence. > thanks in advance > betty i. ----- parallel port doesn't generally do well with switching while power is on. I think that there is too much voltage in the connections to do this conveniently / safely. It would seem that you should be able to use the USB port on your computer to connect to one or the other printer - generally the ink jet printers do well on a USB connection. Not sure of your distribution and each distro varies with it's make up for plug & play device detection and this may be what's at work. On redhat, you could always run 'kudzu' (as root) which would cause it to do a device check - YMMV Craig