For the past week I’ve been unable to print from my office machine. This is apparently a problem that crops up in OS X on occasion, when some vital system file gets clobbered; the effect is that every attempt to print leads to a crashing of the application in question.
The various message boards for such trouble tend to leave one fairly hopeless, since there’s sporadic reports of the problem and all of them tend to end with, you should re-install your OS
, or sometimes you should upgrade
. Well, I’m more or less at the end of the upgrade road as far as this vesion of the OS goes, and I don’t feel like waiting for my department to process the required paperwork to up myself to 10.4, so Archive & Install it is.
As usual, there’s a few issues with this process; one of them is that I rely heavily on a number of applications that live in /usr but don’t come pre-installed… such as the entire TeX subsystem. These get swept away in the re-install, which means that — while most of my Cocoa applications are still in place — I’m going to be spending a lot of time on Monday rebuilding my command-line environment.