I have been using Linux for several years. My favorite distribution is SuSE-Linux. Here is a question which I never could solve in all these years: What do you do in order to stop printing in case your printer produces garbage and you are an ordinary user with no root privileges. I have a partner who uses my computer, in particular she is using staroffice-5.2. Several times the last few month she wanted to stop the computer (a HP-Deskjet 930C on a parallel port) because for some reason or another the printer went into a crazy mode and printed out one page after the other full of incomprehensive stuff. I told her in this case to shut off the printer and call me. I then login as root and type on a terminal 'fuser -k /dev/lp0' as recommended by the SuSE people. Now the whole problem is solved: When I now turn on the computer it has calmed down and behaves normally. Indeed the command ps -aux shows that the printing process has been killed. My real question is to anybody out there who considers himself an expert in Linux: Why is the owner of the printing process started by a particular user not the user in question but the root administrator. Why is it necessary to have root privileges to stop this process? Don't you think that this is a little bit of security overkill at the cost of userfriendlyness? Regards, hansi

You could configure sudo to allow her to run that command as root.