Recently in Gnumeric Category

I did two things today: First, I set up printing with CUPS. I never had trouble with Puppy's pre-CUPS printer-configuration program, but since I've learned enough of CUPS to find my sometimes-hard-to-find network printer (one of about 20 in the vicinity), I'm generally a happy CUPS camper.

There was one problem, however. CUPS asked me for a password. I get the same query when adding this same network printer in Ubuntu, but I enter my login and password and move forward. But Puppy runs in the root account. So what's root's password? I couldn't figure it out. It wasn't nothing, not "root," not "toor." The Puppy forums told me to change root's password:

# passwd root

And then I typed in my usual password. I went back to CUPS started adding the printer, used the new root password ... and it worked.

Remember though, for most normal printers, they'll already be preconfigured in CUPS and you won't have to do any of this.

Then I decided to give Gnumeric a try. I can barely use a spreadsheet at all. I just don't have the occasion to do so, although knowing how to create one would probably be of some use.

The one thing I do with spreadsheets is get them from Web sites. Nielsen Media Research distributes TV ratings via Excel spreadsheets on their Web site (you need to be a registered user, which I am). I could never print one of these things out in OpenOffice -- I always get one line per page, meaning the job would be about 200 pages if I didn't kill it before it ran through half a ream of paper.

Well, I went to the page, clicked on the .xls document, and it opened just right in Gnumeric.

And then I went to print it. The first printout cut off one side of the spreadsheeet just a bit. But the whole damn thing printed out on four landscape pages (8 1/2 x 11 size). So I went into the Gnumeric printer settings, told the program to center the spreadsheet and did a print preview. Then I printed it for real. Looks great.

Not a huge deal, but I got printing set up and was able to read and print an Excel spreadsheet, and I'm happy enough.

Today's Puppy "free memory": 113 MB