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Linux Software

Making Linux Printing as Easy as in Windows 278

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-still-prefer-my-printcap dept.
Jonny5 writes: "In preparation for the transition from windows to a Linux based workstation, the main focus is that of peripheral compatibility. Sure Linux is rock solid stable, and has an almost totally customizable GUI, but dammit, if my hardware won't work, what's the point? ...After hearing about TurboPrint, and their claim to provide 'Printer set-up and configuration is as simple as on Windows or MacOS,' I had to rise to the challenge. LinuxLookup.com has done a full review of TurboPrint For Linux."
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Making Linux Printing as Easy as in Windows More

Making Linux Printing as Easy as in Windows

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  • This is sorely needed (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How come these small things are always lacking in linux?
    • Well, Linux is the type of operating system where you are EXPECTED to go under the hood (as the mechanics would say..*grin*). It's part of the challenge. Initially I had problems with printing on my Slackware 7.1 box. So I installed a script called apsfilter (which came along with the distribution and is available at freshmeat.net or tucows). This little beauty did everything needed to be done for my printer setup, including editing the /etc/printcap file. In my four years of running Linux, I have yet to find anything that there wasn't software regularly available on the net, and print tools such as apsfilter is just one example

      My two bits

      • Well, Linux is the type of operating system where you are EXPECTED to go under the hood (as the mechanics would say..*grin*).

        No the "mechanic" (system administrator) is ment to do this. This need not be the same person as the "driver" (end user).
        With Windows the engine compartment is sealed, but a whole bunch of controls for fuel air mix, engine timing, etc are placed on the dash. (A few of them might not actually be on the dash, but are adjusted by using the steering wheel whilst holding down various buttons on the radio...)
        The Linux way of doing things appears more complex where the same person is expected to both use and administer the machine. The Windows way of doing things is an utter disaster where the user and administrator are different people. Because it is quite easy for the end user to mess things up and the admin cannot easily do any work on a machine whilst it is being used.
      • Well, Linux is the type of operating system where you are EXPECTED to go under the hood (as the mechanics would say..*grin*).

        And as such, all hopes about Linux becoming a dominant desktop OS can be safely ignored.
    • This one isn't. I installed CUPS on my network, had absolutely no problems. All done in the CUPS web based GUI - no problems whatsoever.

  • Printtool? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by PoiBoy ( 525770 )
    At $19 it's reasonably priced, but is it really necessary? Redhat's printtool has always worked fine for me, and it's easy to use.

    I guess the real question is how well it can handle some of the cheap Windows-only printers that are given away for $99 that don't have Linux drivers available anywhere. If it really can support a lot of these, then $99+$19 is still cheap for a printer.

    • Printtool is okay, but Mandrake's printerdrake really takes the cake. Other than some rather annoying UI problems, printerdrake is simple. Contrary to many Linux tools I've seen, it just works - that's the idea, isn't it?
    • I guess the real question is how well it can handle some of the cheap Windows-only printers that are given away for $99 that don't have Linux drivers available anywhere.

      It's not just the cheap printers that are sometimes windows only... I have a xerox laser printer without linux driver support and it's a few years old. So, yes, a test of those almost-throw-away-printers-as-their-cost-is-almost -that-of-the-cartidges-themselves printers is interesting, what about just general SOHO or regular home printer support?
      • 90% of all SOHO laser printers can emulate a HP Laserjet and thus are supported under Linux. The 10% that are left are just the Laser equivilant of the $59 Walmart ink jet printers and really arn't worth the effort.
    • I don't know if it's by the same author, but lprngtool is good too, almost identical. And it should work on any *NIX. I am using this on Slackware.
    • > Redhat's printtool has always worked fine for me,
      > and it's easy to use.

      amen, brother. my canon 'windows only' bubblejet printer is doing fine in its new life as a postscript printer thanks to printtool and ghostscript. I actually use it more for printing from my mac though, as it's shared via appletalk on my lan.



      windows only. heh. snicker.

    • Re:Printtool? (Score:2, Informative)

      by ghack ( 454608 )
      It doesnt support any of the "free", usually giveaway, lexmark, etc printers.

      <A href = "http://www.turboprint.de/printers.html">http:/ /www.turboprint.de/printers.html</a>

      what is the point? that list is so short...and there are free printing infastructures for them already. so why would we pay $19 for this product!?

      these are all fairly expensive hardware printers...not the kind most joe schmucks will have.

    • Re:Printtool? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I recently tired TurboPrint and was impressed. There is a free version that works surprisingly well. The thing I really liked was the quality of the printer drivers. Graphic print outs on my HP inkjet printer are dramtically better than the RedHat/Ghostscript drivers that I was using before. This is the real value added of the product. The configuration tool is nice, but is not the real value added of the product.

  • What's wrong with KPrint/CUPS? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Second_Derivative ( 257815 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:29PM (#2744616)
    I use KPrint (part of KDE infrastructure) with CUPS... I dont think I could ask for much more, though admittedly I think you still have to set the thing up via the CUPS web interface.

    Still, it's better than using lpr/lpq and wondering what bit of the pipeline ate your document =)

  • What I would like to see.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot AT keirstead DOT org> on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:31PM (#2744622)

    .. is some kind of wine-driven printer emulation layer, that would let you use windows printer driver sin Linux. Why? Because I have a printer that I have had for 4 years now, and is still nowhere near a Linux solution. Is this idea even possible? I think it would be great if it were, since I could finally use my printer!

    • The Windows GDI (Score:5, Informative)

      by rcw-home ( 122017 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:48PM (#2744691)
      Windows print drivers work by accepting Windows GDI (Graphics Device Interface) commands and using them to plot a page.

      UNIX apps don't send GDI commands - they usually send postscript commands.

      So unless someone wants to write a postscript to GDI filter, that approach won't work.

      Oh, and things that need to communicate directly with your hardware (like this printer driver) may not be able to run in wine anyway.

      • Well, since you can print from a wine app to your linux printer, I assume there must already be some GDI to Postscript code in there. So it should not be that hard to reverse it, so that it is Postscript to GDI, maybe?

        • Translating GDI to postscript code under wine is as trivial as using an existing Windows driver for a postscript printer.

        • Re:The Windows GDI (Score:3, Informative)

          by printman ( 54032 )
          There's a big difference between GDI and PostScript. GDI is a very limited "draw here" type of interface, while PostScript is a full-blown language that must be interpreted in order to produce a page.

          That said, Ghostscript already provides a GDI interface, so it might be possible to use WINE with Ghostscript and the vendor print driver to produce a print driver. *However*, many Windows printer drivers have their own parallel/USB drivers, so it may not be possible to do this within WINE (maybe VMWARE, tho)
    • A Wine printer layer would work well if we got to use the Microsoft drivers - those drivers are simple and to the point. Getting a Wine layer to work with manfactureres priter drivers would be hard, as most manufacturer drivers include the kitchen sink: Flashy dialog boxes, ink level applets, news paper delivery (I kid you not, some HP driver pacakges install software to deliver a newspaper to your printer every day)

      I'm not sure how it would work though, as I understand it, you would have to have a buffer for the unix driver to print to and have your Wine app send 'bands' of info to the MS Widnows print driver, as the MS Windows print model was designed to work well with inkjet printer, you cant just send commands ad hoc to the driver to anypary of a page, you must send a complete bands of information to the driver in order from top to bottom. It's kinda of a kludge. But then we know we could expect the 'finest' from Microsoft.
      • the MS Windows print model was designed to work well with inkjet printer, you cant just send commands ad hoc to the driver to anypary of a page, you must send a complete bands of information to the driver in order from top to bottom. It's kinda of a kludge.

        This is completely false.

        The commands are GDI commands. Your word processor (for example) sends the same commands to render fonts on a word processor screen as it does to render them on a printed page. Only after your word processor has sent all the commands for a page can the print driver begin sending that page to the printer.

        The windows print "driver" (filter really is more accurate) interprets these commands into the printer's native language (PCL, postscript, page-description-language-of-the-month, etc). Then it sends that to the windows parallel port driver (with certain exceptions - some drivers for cheapo printers talk to the printer on their own) in whatever-sized chunks it likes. Typically for laser printers, a driver would send an entire page to the printer, for dot-matrix, daisy-wheel, and inkjet printers, it would send a line or two at once.

        Having a common interface to do both your display rendering and your print rendering makes sense, and Microsoft didn't come up with the idea. I'm not sure who did, but NeXT was touting "display postscript" a very long time ago.

        • Hmm..
          My experience was with the Win 3.1 GDI model. The stupid thing was so braindead that there were a finite amount of GDI 'Handles' that the computer had - fail to release a few and the stupid OS would crash. If you sent GDI commands to the bottom of the page while the top wasent finished, you'd run out of memory on the HP 500 Deskjet drivers. AFAIK - NT still has GDI crap, but then I wouldent really know as I've moved on to real operating systems and ditched the toys.
          • You're both right. The current GDI model with the standard "Windows Driver Model" type drivers just passes standard GDI drawing commands, and the driver is responsible for dealing with them.

            That said, there are many printer devices that aren't "WDM", including the weird large-format printers, plotters, and copy-shop stuff. For these, GDI has "backdoors" and other trickery that allows some drivers and apps to send data directly to the device, bypassing GDI's interpretation. An example might be dumping a huge raster image at 600DPI 24-bit color to a 36" paper-size plotter. For this sort of thing, GDI will run out of memory trying to interpret the whole thing, and you have to send things down in "bands", as zulux points out.

            The bulk of printers that everyone uses these days are pretty much WDM compatible, so GDI generally works. For those devices that ain't, it's pretty nasty business.
        • Having a common interface to do both your display rendering and your print rendering makes sense, and Microsoft didn't come up with the idea. I'm not sure who did, but NeXT was touting "display postscript" a very long time ago.

          And now NeXT's son, Mac OS X, uses the son of postscript (PDF) for the display (through 'Quartz' technology) and the printing. True WYSIWYG.
  • Cons:
    limited printer support
    tarball install
    missing dependencies
    Pros (or why should I use this over standard KDE print config/RedHat printer filters/anything else):
    Perhaps your obscure WinPrinter is supported

    Nice effort guys, but there's no real value here.

  • Easy as Windows - LOL (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    LOL - Windows isn't about making things easy to use or well- designed from a user perspective.

    Always aim higher than an existing Windows solution!

    A C

  • Oh, Joy. (Score:2, Troll)

    by bcboy ( 4794 )
    As easy as windows? Does that mean it's going to ask to be rebooted three times, crap out because it can't find the files it needs on the install disk, then (after I manually find the files) install the same printer device twice, in such a way that neither of them works? Uninstall, reboot, reinstall, reboot, repeat until device works.

    I'm sure there's an o/s easier to configure than linux, but, good lord, it isn't Windows.

    • Re:Oh, Joy. (Score:3, Informative)

      by augustz ( 18082 )
      You obviously have not tried Windows 2000/XP etc.

      The simple fact is almost every printer out there works with these OS's, out of the box. That is important.

      Plug-n-play means you get a dialog box, and half the time the driver is already loaded with windows, otherwise you can use the supplied diskette.

      Users are comfortable and familiar with this system, and it work 90% of the time nowadays. I havn't had a problem recently on a whole range of systems and printers.

      Now, getting printing going under Linux is NO WHERE near that easy. Vendor supplied disks don't have drivers, and linux simply has a smaller driver base than windows overall.

      That your rather silly post got modded up indicates that most people reading slashdot don't actually have to support computer installations or havn't actually used linux to print. The fact is for things like printers which require large driver bases, Windows with its monopoly power has linux beat.

      So please, get a clue before posting.

      • Re:Oh, Joy. (Score:3, Informative)

        by nmos ( 25822 )
        " You obviously have not tried Windows 2000/XP etc. "

        Or maybe he's just used NT/95/98 more. What is the Win2k/XP installed base? 10%?

        "The simple fact is almost every printer out there works with these OS's, out of the box. That is important."

        I've run into just as many printers that don't work right under Win2k as under Linux.

        "Plug-n-play means you get a dialog box, and half the time the driver is already loaded with windows, otherwise you can use the supplied diskette. "

        At which point you either use the drivers built into Windows and give up 2/3 of the printer's feature set or you use the drivers that came on the cd only to find that they are badly broken.

        "linux simply has a smaller driver base than windows overall."

        Not really, remember that a single driver on Linux may work with dozens of different printers. The actual number of printers supported is probably pretty similar.

        "That your rather silly post got modded up indicates that most people reading slashdot don't actually have to support computer installations or havn't actually used linux to print."

        Frankly I think you either arn't all that experienced yourself or your convienently forgetting about the times Win2k has failed to work right with a printer.
  • When users of an open source operating system are all but forced to rely on commercial products just to install a simple printer driver, there's something amiss. Does anybody know of an open source project to provide similar support?
    • CUPS (http://www.cups.org/) and GIMP-print (http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/)
    • This product doesn't even support the HP 7xx series of printers. It appears to only support printers that were already supported anyways. There is nothing amiss, other than new linux users insisting that everything be like windows. This would be solved if people would learn how to setup their linux systems and run them like linux systems rather than complaining that it's not windows.
      • There is nothing amiss, other than new linux users insisting that everything be like windows. This would be solved if people would learn how to setup their linux systems and run them like linux systems rather than complaining that it's not windows.

        Good point, but I work in an environment where all the development work is done in Linux and BSD, all the developers (about 25% of this small company) use Linux on the desktop, the BOFHs use Linux and Solaris, the designers use Mac/Windows, everybody else uses Windows. And why shouldn't they? When MS makes it physically or financially difficult for a small company to use Windows, out people will move to MacOS, or Linux, or whatever works. But they will need to be able to read DOC and XLS.

        We really do need the courts to make MS publicise these formats.

  • IMHO, setting up a printer is just as easy in Linux as in Windows - if you already have the driver, that is. apt-get install cupsys cubsys-bsd and point your browser at http://localhost:631 [localhost], then just chose your printer.
    If you need to compile Ghostscript with stp-support it gets much harder though. Buying an older printer makes stuff a whole lot easier.

  • Windows isn't easy neither... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pinkpineapple ( 173261 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:41PM (#2744663) Homepage
    Have you ever tried to set up a shared printer on a windows box attached to a LocalTalk network (Mac)? This is NOT easy :-(
    Granted that is not the most popular case, but you've got to admit that MS didn't make that option too obvious. Those bastards. My HP 2000NT is still printing 2 pages of PS crap at the end of each printing session ONLY from the windows box (with latest drivers and 4 days watch in hand with MS/HP tech support.)

    PPA -- the girl next door.

  • Printing?!? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kitts ( 545683 )
    This is one of the core problems with Linux. Someone comes out charging money so we can do something as menial as print documents, and we actually have to take it seriously.

    It's part of the basic problem with the degree of modularization (a supposed "Good Thing") that we have, I guess. Still, it'd be nice if we could have all this sort of basic admin stuff thrown into a central location with other peripherals, instead of one for the OS, one for the GUI, etc.

    IMO, this is something Windows did right. I've been working with Linux for a long time so this isn't a surprise to me, but I can just imagine the look I'd get from newbies I'm trying to win over to our side when I try to give reasons for why Linux doesn't have a true equivalent for the Control Panel.

    • what "side"? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:36PM (#2744840)
      What is this "our side" you're talking about? I mean this seriously.

      "My side" wrt Linux is a place where things really ARE modular and logical. Where, if you have an extraordinary knowledge of systems and computer science as a whole, you can enjoy your time in it. Where, if something isn't working, you can change and recompile it within hours.

      Your "our side" seems to be that awful "I want Linux to be a better Windows than Windows!" garbage. Here's some advice: Linux is not Windows, and Linux will never be Windows. It will never be worse than Windows; it will never be better than Windows -- IT WILL NEVER BE COMPARABLE TO WINDOWS. If you want something like Windows, use Windows. If you want something kind of like Windows but different, use Windows. If you want something better than Windows -- sorry to say it -- you're going to have to live with Windows. LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS.

      And why on Earth would you be trying to "win over" someone to "your side"?! Can you even THINK of anything more dishonest? Linux is not Britney Spears; it is not a Happy Meal. If people use it, it's because they want a free Unix-like operating systems, they've done their research, and they WANT to use it. It's not because they've been tricked into something (sorry -- "won over"), so that when they finally do try out Linux, they're horribly disappointed at how un-Windows-like it is, and hold some kind of great resentment towards it.

      Look around the web. How many "Linux sucks" posts and websites do you find? A LOT. Is it because Linux actually sucks? Not likely. It's because some "helpful" friend tried to "win them over". They probably said something like "if you're tired of Windows crashing all the time, try this other operating system called Linux". They try Linux, expecting it to be better than Windows, and SURPRISE SURPRISE find out that it "sucks". If you use Linux expecting it to be Windows, guess it, it sucks donkey balls. Not just any donkey balls either -- big ones. LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS. DON'T PRETEND IT IS. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY AND COMPUTER USERS EVERYWHERE, DO NOT "WIN OVER" SOMEONE EVER AGAIN.

      • Did you breathe while typing this? I can just about imagine you gasping near the end of your post. :-)

        Still, I think (softly) trying to move people away from Windows is a good thing. One word: monopoly. However: be realistic and honest when you try to interest friends in Linux or *BSD. Make sure they realise the limitations as well as the obvious advantages. Try to interest them, do not try to 'win them over'. And be prepared to offer them lots of help. Find the time for that by cutting down on helping windows-dudes :-)

        Ofcourse it helps a lot if they have a second machine on which to try an OS OS. Maybe you even have some old box you really have no use for anymore, maybe you might think about donating it to a newbie. It will get them interested in networking, at least.

      • Re:what "side"? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by kitts ( 545683 )
        Woo, someone got your panties in a bunch.

        "My side" wrt Linux is a place where things really ARE modular and logical.

        "Logical" how? It may seem logical to some to have the sum of an operating system be a massive collection of different parts, but look how long it's taken for there to be any sort of standardization with Linux because of it. Meanwhile, most people would tend to think that it would be "logical" to locate all main administration tasks in one umbrella, and subdivide from there.

        Your "our side" seems to be that awful "I want Linux to be a better Windows than Windows!" garbage.

        My side is the same side as yours, my anonymous little friend (missed karma points, too -- should've posted under your own steam). I just want to see the operating system be the best that it can be, and that sort of thing only gets accomplished with more work and more eyes criticizing it.

        And there's nothing that says that modularity has to come at the expense of user-friendliness -- but unfortunately, historically, that's been our case.

        If people use it, it's because they want a free Unix-like operating systems, they've done their research, and they WANT to use it.

        Oh. Well, just in case you care, I started using it because I wanted an alternative to Windows. Didn't know a damn thing about Unix beforehand, and I was really happy with what I got. I still see some shortcomings -- the topic of this discussion being one of them -- but on the whole I think the OS is definitely worthy of trying to win over my friends, many of whom are growing skeptical at Microsoft's business practices and the crappy OS they put out.

        LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS.

        Now, to me, this sounds like rationalizing one's way into an excuse not to grow and evolve. One might as well start this sort of argument regarding different kernel versions. Linux today is not the same OS as it was last year, nor is Windows today the same OS as it was last year. That there's some convergence in the tasks that the two OS's perform is not pure happenstance. The two don't exist in a vacuum. To not try to steal the best aspects of a competitor is silly, to justify it because it rocks your comfort level is at best willfull ignorance, at worst dangerous.
    • I think it would be quite good to see printer drivers in the kernel. CUPS is nice and all, but before manufacturers are going to supply drivers, every Linux user needs the same printing system. If the kernel had this, it would make things easier. Maybe I should suggest it on LKML.
      • Unfortunately, there is a *lot* to printer drivers, and you really don't want a kernel driver doing dithering, etc!

        Now, for special printer interfaces (say, the FireWire interface that the EPSON Stylus Pro 10000 can use) you may want/need a special kernel driver for the printer *interface*, but leave the printer driver itself in user space.
    • "I can just imagine the look I'd get from newbies I'm trying to win over to our side when I try to give reasons for why Linux doesn't have a true equivalent for the Control Panel."

      Linux doesn't have the Control Panel because it is not Windows: it's a UNIX clone and it does a fine job running as such. If people you trying to 'win over' (whatever that's supposed to mean) don't understand this, then you have failed in explaining what exactly it is you're trying to switch them over to.

  • doesn't seem comparable to Mac or Windows (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tim_maroney ( 239442 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:43PM (#2744676) Homepage
    What's wrong with this picture?

    Printer set-up and configuration is as simple as on Windows or MacOS

    TurboPrint for Linux comes as a tarball containing 'install' and 'uninstall' shell scripts, installation instructions, and all the binary software.

    Yes, it's a command-line installer!

    The default printing would be in black and white, and when I want to print in colour, I can just change the print command used by the program from 'lpr' to something like 'lpt -Ptp0'.

    Yes, you have to give command line options to set printing modes every time you print with a different mode!

    And yet this gets an 18 out of 20 in the review. It's amazing to me that this late in the game, there are still so many Linux-heads who just don't get it. This is not just inferior to Mac and Windows -- it's a giant quantum leap backward from where Mac has been for seventeen years and Windows for six. Real end users don't memorize command languages.

    Tim
    • I love it when people post without actually making sure that they read the article correctly.

      You do not have to give command line options to set printing modes, the author just decided it would be easier for him to enable different modes as different printers. If you simply want to change printing modes, you can use a graphical method similar to that used by Windows or Mac OS.
      • Either I read the article correctly or it is misleading. It says that different command line parameters are necessary for different printing modes, and that the parameters are set by the user. In order to set up his different printers, he had to change the printing command line options in each of the different printer instances. It's true that this only needs to be done once per mode and the user can then select different "virtual" printers for the right option set without re-typing the stored command line, but it does need to be done once per mode -- or else the article is false in saying that "when I want to print in colour, I can just change the print command used by the program from 'lpr' to something like 'lpt -Ptp0'". That states that the user changes the command line; it does not state at any point that using GUI options changes the command line for the user.

        Tim
      • I love it when people post without actually making sure that they read the article correctly.

        I love it even more when they get modded through the roof by moderators who also didn't read the article.

        -Legion

    • The problem isn't just command line (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @10:10PM (#2746076)
      It doesn't really get much better if the "linux-heads" try to put a GUI front-end on things. Widget layouts are often poorly thought out and often covey contradictory or ambiguous choices for configuration. These sad attempts at usability are even praised more highly than the supposedly "easy" command line stuff. The real problem is that the linux hackers designing interfaces in the linux community get sugar-coated reviews of their stuff by other linux hackers who are far too eager to say something is usable out of their ignorance of user interface design and out of their belief that anything under GPL is inherently superior to anything proprietary, interface or otherwise. As a personal experience, I once talked to a person who created a linux installer for a very prominent linux distribution and I mentioned a few of the dozens of confusing or ambiguous or inconsistent things I found in its interface. He couldn't understand what the problem was: he thought I thought that it "wasn't pretty enough". And yet die-hard linux zealots who remember vi commands before they remember their wife's anniversary claim that this interface is perfectly easy and that this installer is perfectly ready for the desktop.

      The few people with interface design knowledge who point out these problems are usually called "whiners", and are told to shut up and code their own improvements.

      Putting it bluntly, the linux development community is doing more to kill linux on the desktop than Bill Gates ever could. Microsoft realizes this, and that's they have never considered linux on the desktop a threat.
      • Nobody can compete with MS on the desktop. Not linux, not Mac, not Be, Not anybody. If truly superior GUIs like the Mac are unable to put a dent in the MS monopoly nothing will. MS has a monopoly and will contue to have a monopoly now that the they bitchslapped the United States government into submission.

        Linux was, is and will continue to be by and for geeks. Nothing wrong with that. It's been good for linux so far and it will continue to be good in the future. Let the mindless massed use windows and be led by nose by Bill gates. They will be forced to endure mindless ads, they will be forced to subscribe to MSN and passport, they will lose their privacy, they will get their life story turned over to marketing firms. It's the fate of the stupid sheep to be slaughtered and eaten.

  • Why not just cups. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dsb3 ( 129585 )
    I use cups [easysw.com] and it does all I need to do and more.

    It's almost completely manageable via a web interface (the only thing I know of that isn't is setting the default printer). It integrates very nicely with samba. It uses gimpprint drivers to create nice output on newer printers.

    The reviews indicates that it can use cups, but I don't yet understand what this gives me that cups doesn't do already.
  • "Sure Linux is rock solid stable"

    And why do you think that is ? also, why do you think Linux (and most Unices) are more secure on a network than Windows ?

    I agree that the Linux kernel is better designed (although to be honest I know next to nothing about the newer Windows kernels, and some supposedly knowledgeable people told me they were actually pretty good). But the biggest reason why Linux is more stable and more secure is because you, the computer-savvy user, took time to configure everything right and install servers right.

    Now, if you want to make a Linux-based system that your grandma can use, you'll have to mask the concept of users vs. root with some suid installation utils, you'll have to allow everybody and their dogs to install any piece of software and insmod any driver from any vendor, you might have to slap in the equivalent of a registry to alleviate the current mess of etc files in a typical Linux fs, ...etc...

    If you do all that, if you make Linux user-friendly like Windows is (supposedly, I can't even begin to comprehend its organization), then I guarantee you the resulting system will be less stable and less secure than a standard Linux distro.

    The real reason why Windows is shitty is because it's designed to be used by computer idiots. I believe that if computer users were required to learn basic computer sanity, and Windows didn't have the convenience/security/stability tradeoffs it has today to make up for computer idiocy, Windows would kick any OS' butt any day. And "basic computer sanity" doesn't mean the user has to learn how to install daemons, it means "don't run executables from Joe_Sixpack@hotmail.com", just like "don't stick candy bars in the toaster" in real life : if people had that basic good sense, there would be no auto execution in Outlook, because people would find that crazy.

    • ...why do you think Linux (and most Unices) are more secure on a network than Windows ?

      hehe [cert.org], good one. An operating system as big as Windows XP that is vulerable out of the box with the default setup is unacceptable to me. Many people that have already purchased this operating system will not patch this hole. We'll be seeing Code Red II pretty soon.

      Is RH 7 vulnerable OOTB with the default installation, no. Some services such as wuftpd are vulnerable to a remote exploit, but the user must turn those on manually. It is then assumed that the user knows what he or she is doing and then secures the service by updating the RPMs. In the XP case, the user just has to take the computer home from Best Buy and plug the thing into the cable modem and it's vulnerable.

  • Printing, and then maybe fonts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beautyon ( 214567 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:47PM (#2744688) Homepage
    The next problem after printing is ironed out is the lack of a single, easy to use tool to add, temporarily disable, manage and remove fonts in any Linux setup, that makes one set of fonts (both ttf and Type 1) in a single directory available to all applications system wide, in the way that Adobe Type Manager does.

    We then need CMYK capability in The Gimp. After these are in place, it will be possible to assemble a desktop publishing suite that will have mass appeal, because anyone will be able to design and publish to QuarkXpress/Photoshop/Illustrator quality, and print the results, all in a rock solid, free alternative to Windoze and OSX, without any pain.
    • We then need CMYK capability in The Gimp.

      Easier said than done. Color science is still serious voodoo, and entire companies have foundered on the rock of device-specific color correction. There are now a few fairly good color management systems out there, but they're not free. Creating a good free one would involve the uncompensated labor of some talented color scientists for a few years, and guess what -- the open source ideal doesn't really exist in color science, and good color scientists with a grasp of computability are very hard to find. They'll also require several supporting programmers.

      Then, once you've got the basic system, you have to create profiles for all the color printers in the market; or, you can boost the difficulty level by an order of magnitude and try to create a general-purpose adaptive color calibration system so that users can calibrate their own printers -- which requires a color-calibrated scanner, and so merely shifts the per-device calibration cost, as well as requiring the user to have a scanner.

      It's really hard for me to see how those things could happen in an open source environment. You're probably talking an investment of at least five million dollars.

      Tim
      (former employee of EFI and Light Source)
      • I really don't know why people keep on talking about CMYK.

        That stuff is patented and thus illegal.

        Instead of complaining to developers complain to your congressman because they are the only people that can change it.

        • CMYK is not patented.

          There are certain color management and color profiling technologies that are patented, however the process of printing using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black is very old.
    • People keep talking about CMYK like it's the one thing which stops GIMP from being Photoshop. Wouldn't it be more effective (and have less patent problems) to actually get GIMP up to par with Photoshop 5 in terms of other features?

      The replies will inevitably say that GIMP can do everything Photoshop can do. This is technically true. Editing individual pixels in a hex editor can also do everything Photoshop can do, but that doesn't mean it's the nicest way. Incidentally, I use both Photoshop and GIMP a lot.
  • I use Cups on my ML 8.1 box and have never had a problem with it and my Canon BJC-2100. This whole thing just seems like hogwash. And in response to the comment about cheap printers for less than 99$. My Canon cost about 49$ after a 20$ rebate. Its a fine printer and its USB. Just be careful what you buy.
  • This article is based upon the conclusion that someone wants to convert from a windows environment to a linux enviroment. Turbo print is not the solution. People having to buy extra software (that they can see as a part not included in the whole linux package) is not convinient, it just add's extra confusion. I would be more happy if this was a normal (open-source) kernel module or something.

    By the way: Turbo linux is here [turboprint.de]

  • CUPS (Score:4, Informative)

    by Enahs ( 1606 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:58PM (#2744722) Journal
    Even on Debian, it was pretty much point-and-click for me...fire up a web browser, point it at http://localhost:631, click on "Manage Printers", click "Add Printer," enter a superuser name and password, and follow the steps from then on.

    It really is that simple, unless you've got a distro that has a weird installation of CUPS.

    Heck, on Mandrake boxes, one can often have the printer autodetected, and the installer can often (in my experience) choose the correct driver.

    • Re:CUPS (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 )
      I had some problems getting CUPS setup on my Debian installation because it wasn't perfectly clear what packages to install to get everything working. But, after I poked around in dselect for a while, I figured it out and once it is running, CUPS is a breeze.

      My perception is that most people have problems not with printing, but with their printer. People buy printers that only work with oddball command languages or expect the host CPU to do absolutely everything and send them raster lines. Whem I am asked about these marginal printers at LUG meetings and installfests, I advise people to get postscript or pcl/hpgl printers. These are standard printer languages. I have never seen a printing situation that postcript couldn't handle.

      But people still buy these cheapo printers and when they find out that Linux mostly supports elegant, standard printer interfaces they jump directly into "Linux sucks" rants.

      One way to convince these people to buy "real" printers is to point out that a printer with some specialized driver might not be supported in the future. Suppose the manufacturer made a driver for printer yzx-ii for Windows 3.11. They discontinued the printer in 1994 but they still released a driver for Win95. They updated their driver for Win98, but they never did bother porting it to WinNT. Now they don't support Windows 2000 or XP, and you can't expect them to keep writing drivers for printers they last sold eight years ago.

      Now look at the alternative case. Instead of yzx-ii you layed out a little more cash for a postscript printer. This printer is going to work with any past, present, or future operating system until the hardware falls to pieces. The buyer of a postscript (or pcl) printer never has to worry about printer drivers. He's got a postscript printer! It's just like HTML, TeX, and so on: the standard is out there, you can't kill it, and it will be supported for eternity.

      My printer is an Apple LaserWriter II NTR, which I found in the trash. It has a postscript processor, so I can use it with Linux and like operatings systems, Windows [3,95,NT,XP], OS/2, and vintage of MacOS, and so forth. This printer was introduced in 1992 and it still works great, without software problems of any kind. I'll never need a new "driver" for it because I already have the postscript printer description file and I don't believe the hardware is changing! If I had paid money for this printer, I would consider it a wonderful purchase.

      (end of rant)

  • I started using Linux in 1996. Back then it was hard to find out if X supported your video card. Now X supports most video cards except the newest and companies like Nvidia, Matrox and several others are providing drivers on their web sites for some of their cards. This is a big step.

    With other hardware networorking under Linux seems to have been the biggest win-win. Many network cards are supported under Linux now as well. So are many sound cards.

    Support comes slower under Linux, but it does seem to come. More and more larger companies are supporting LInux and with the way that windows XP is moving I am wondering how many people will really want to stay with windows. Since companies like IBM and other large companies are beginning to back linux it may only be a matter of time before the smaller companies and companies that promise Linux support actually do.

    Personally I think it would be nice the be able to buy hardware for Linux and have it come with open source drivers and software. Or atleast instructions on what software you need to have on the machine and kernel drivers. Soon I hope...

  • One part of the solution is simple: buy only PostScript printers. PostScript printer support is quite mature in all UNIX-like operating systems.

    The hard part: Under X11, there is no default mapping from screen fonts to printer fonts (which can have completely different metrics). That's why printing with non-standard fonts is often problematic if you don't use proven tools such as TeX or roff.

  • Same kind of problem I have been having... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lostman ( 172654 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:06PM (#2744755)
    Sure Linux is rock solid stable, and has an almost totally customizable GUI, but dammit, if my hardware won't work, what's the point?

    I set up a windows xp box for someone the other day. It was QUITE an upgrade from their old 133 mhz computer -- they were excited that all their programs will run SUPER FAST and that their printers/scanners/etc will be OH SO nice...

    ... and then we find out that most of their software WILL NOT RUN under XP (yes even by using compatibility mode) and that they will have had to have gotten a new scanner and printer because they wont work either.

    Now I'm sure that windows xp has changed QUITE a few things but come on... they have used winxp for a bit now to see if they can put up with it.. they now want me to install windows 98 on there... quite an upgrade (if you ask me)...

    Now before you say "Put them on Linux!" -- get real.. would you put your mother-in-law on linux --> knowing you dont want to put up with her "Whats this? BASH? Is this a joke??"... feh on them all..
    • When I transitioned to Win2k, I had few, if any problems. Surely you've tried downloading new drivers off the printer and scanner manufacturer's website.

      Im curious though, will win2k drivers work under XP? That's a possible solution if the manufacturer hasnt put out their XP drivers.

    • Or, the reality re-write: I set up a windows XP box for someone the other day. It was QUITE an upgrade from their old 133 mhz computer...they were excited that all their programs will run SUPER FAST and that their printers/scanners/etc will be OH SO nice... Unfortunately I couldn't be bothered to check the Hardware Compatibility List, or check that the software was compatible, instead for some reason trusting blindly that it would all work. When it didn't, we decided to blame Microsoft.

  • Why not Lexmark? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:21PM (#2744803) Homepage


    In my experience, Lexmark [lexmark.com] has wonderful Linux support for its products. $79 at Best Buy got me a very high quality 1200dpi inkjet printer (the Lexmark Z23) with both Windows and Linux support. The Linux side actually works better than its Windows counterpart, oddly enough. It runs as a daemon process, does PostScript exactly the way it should, and the fact that its a USB printer doesn't complicate the situation either. It all just plain works, out of the box. Even has a nice graphical config utility

    Kudos to Lexmark for doing it right!

  • How is this different than cups + (kups | xpp) ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Phibz ( 254992 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:26PM (#2744815)
    I've recently rediscovered cups. For my printing needs, mixed unix and some windows it beats everything else hands down. It provides easy web based administration or if you're fimilar with the bsd or sysv (big bonus for me since i primarly use solaris) style command line tools it has those as well. But the number one thing that makes me choose cups overy anything else is its support for using PPD drivers. Need a driver for that freaky printer, Xerox DocuCenter 332ST in our case? Download the PPD stick it in /usr/share/cups/model and off you go. Now i can use all the features of the printer. Not just simply print to it. Eg. now i can colate, staple, duplex print etc. Couple this with kups or xpp which are "print setup" like programs that let you adjust your print settings and its almost as easy as on a mac. So aside from support for "winprinters" how is turbo print different from cups?

  • Linux needs a standard printing API (Score:4, Interesting)

    by leeward ( 313589 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:26PM (#2744817)

    This is, in my opinion, one of the areas that will continue to limit the ability of Linux to be used on the desktop. The printing process is simple and flexible for a hacker, if it is a supported printer, but fails the mom test miserably.

    What is really needed is an organization with some clout to get behind an API that can be integrated into applications, with a standard, integrated menu selected printer control. Just like the Macs have had for 17 years and Windoze has had for 10? years. There have been a couple of attempts in this direction, which seem to have mostly fizzled. That is why heavyweight clout will be required to make such a thing work.

    CUPS is an improvement and a little easier to use for the printer driver installation and setup. But this does not address the user interface. This is something that perhaps Redhat, on the Gnome side, and perhaps some other organization on the KDE side, should have handled years ago. I think this is far more important than having a Gnome/KDE office suite.

    The fundamentals should be the first priority, and in an office, printing is absolutely fundamental and critical. A big enough busines can perhaps afford to hire a Linux guru to set up printing, but that should not be required and will remain a roadblock. In fairness, Windoze printer installation and setup is often no picnic either, but that is no excuse for Linux being so lame in this area.

    • standard APIs (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dakoda ( 531822 )
      and this will unfortunatly probably never happen. Linux people (myself included) are generally gung ho about having multiple apis for everything. while this is good in some ways, it's awful in others. we have X, with no kind of gui standard. theres pdq (what i use), lpr (lousy imho), cups (gonna give it a spin in a bit), and this. for sound, there was oss, which i used for ever, programmed for, and everything, and now alsa, which absolutly rocks (featurewise). and these are for common, user side things. people continue to speculate what linux needs to 'win the desktop,' and the list is generally something like : apps, ms office, games.
      while these would help, it'd be more helpful to people writing those if they had a standard api to write for, rather than trying to accomodate all of them. but as soon as you say 'one standard' you get the general 'one world, one os' reply. its unfortunate, really, despite how helpful it really would be.

      theres nothing wrong with progress, but some coherence would provide worlds of help to developers.

      just my 2 cents
    • This is, in my opinion, one of the areas that will continue to limit the ability of Linux to be used on the desktop. The printing process is simple and flexible for a hacker, if it is a supported printer, but fails the mom test miserably.

      Remember that the "mom test" only applies to one specific variety of desktops. The end user administered ones, which are most likely SOHO. It other situations issues change since it simply isn't the end users job to be messing around connecting printers.

      What is really needed is an organization with some clout to get behind an API that can be integrated into applications, with a standard, integrated menu selected printer control. Just like the Macs have had for 17 years and Windoze has had for 10? years.

      One thing you want to avoid copying is the Windows printer dialogue covering any paper size known to man (sometimes including sizes which cannot physically fit in the printer at all.) You also need some way of coping with applications wanting to print several logical pages on one physical sheet. Relitivly easy with ISO paper, since this has a width to length ratio of 1:sqt(2), it certainly dosn't hold for US Letter or US Legal...
      Also do functions to "service" the printer such as head cleaning on ink jets logically belong with controls for printing?

  • Printerdrake (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MicroBerto ( 91055 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:41PM (#2744858)
    I don't ever print much, so when I read these threads, I decided to try setup my mama's shared printer upstairs. She's got an HP PSC 500 (multifunction printer, doubted it was even supported).

    Loaded up printerdrake in my Mandrake 8.1 installation.

    2 minutes later, I run upstairs to find see the printer goin to work on a perfect test page!

    Mandrake rules, kids. No need to spend 20 dollars on anything else.

  • We don't really need this! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xise ( 538117 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @03:08PM (#2744931) Homepage
    All thats lacking for linux printing is the knowledge of whats avaliable, check out linuxprinting.org [linuxprinting.org] As a summary if you use Redhat use printtool, suse have there own setup in yast, Mandrake probably have something too, for debian or most other distributions use aps [apsfilter.org] though as with most setups you need ghostscript(for postscript conversion) and a printer spooler such as lpd or lprng. Never used it but CUPS is supposed to be easy to use and of course you could just buy a postscript printer. I don't see why this commercial program is needed, use whats out there and free as in beer and speech!

  • To all you CUPS advocates out there... (Score:5, Informative)

    by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Sunday December 23, 2001 @03:11PM (#2744939) Homepage
    ...Just make sure you set
    PreserveJobHistory No
    PreserveJobFiles No
    in your /etc/cupsd.conf, or your cupsd process will get HUGE over time!! Mine grew to over 17 Meg on my own box. Sheesh!

    Also, make sure there are no spaces after the 'No's. The first time I tried configuring this, I had a space after the word and the braindead parser couldn't recognize the option because of it(not sure if they've fixed it in the newer versions or not)...so I swore for a couple hours before actually checking my syslog as to why the damned thing kept ignoring the option :)

    The GUI should let you purge completed jobs, IMNSHO. For a basically single-user system, it's best to just disable those two options, unless you are into checking your /var/spool/cups directory on a regular basis (I have better things to do with my time)

    • The trailing space problem was indeed fixed a while back.

      Also, the default is now to preserve the last 500 jobs (not every job ever printed), so disabling job history shouldn't be necessary unless you want to eliminate any extra memory use on your system.

      I *think* the web interface has a "purge jobs" button, and you can do "cancel -a printer" to purge the job history for a printer.
      • The trailing space problem was indeed fixed a while back.

        Good! But I only recently moved to Mandrake 8.1, 7.2 having worked wonderfully for me (and 8.1 didn't add anything for me, really, other than a JFS...everything else was already there or easily added myself from 7.2)....the point being that I am sure there are many people out there still using older versions of cups.

        Also, the default is now to preserve the last 500 jobs (not every job ever printed), so disabling job history shouldn't be necessary unless you want to eliminate any extra memory use on your system.

        Also Good!

        I *think* the web interface has a "purge jobs" button, and you can do "cancel -a printer" to purge the job history for a printer.

        No way of checking at the moment, since I killed the option to keep the stuff hanging around in my spool file as I suggested <grin>

  • The Problems with Printing in Linux (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @04:14PM (#2745107) Homepage Journal
    The problems with printing in Linux (or any other UNIX for that matter) go beyond simple setup and configuration of the printer. Until just recently, setup and configuration have been the only problems that anyone has addressed.

    I used to maintain printer drivers for Windows and OS/2, and the implementation of the print subsystem on those operating systems is one of the very few areas where I've thought the design was more elegant than any UNIX solution I've seen. I suspect this is due to the modular nature of UNIX, which in this case turns out to be a weakness.

    In a nutshell, the OS/2 and Windows kernels export an interface that you write functions to when you're writing a driver. This interface covers page rendering as well as printer set-up and configuration. That means anyone who wants to render a page need only call those functions and doesn't need to worry about what printer he's sending to. Integration of feature selection into your application program is also much simpler and takes advantage of the code written by the printer driver programmer.

    The down side to all this of course, that since the GUI subsystems of OS/2 and Windows ran in kernel space, a poorly written printer driver can easily crash your entire system.

    Only recently have efforts been made to address the rendering side of the problem with the Xprt extension to XF86 and the toolbox-level gnome-print library (I assume the KDE people have something similar as well.) While these efforts are good, a printer manufacturer is not likely to put the effort into supporting all of them. This means that we will continue to write our own rendering code to render into PostScript.

    Ghostscript seems to have become the de-facto printer driver for Linux and the only real complaints I have about it are that it's much harder to integrate printer features into your program when Ghostscript is in use. I ended up trying to get around these problems by writing an incomplete PPD parser for the printers I was working with. This parser generated information files about the printer features and a lpr replacement program would present these features to the user. We did a pretty good job of making a GUI installer and front-end for printer feature selection, but it only supported our printers.

    Technically it wouldn't be a very difficult problem to address these issues and make everything seamless for the programmer and the users. Politically it's rather more difficult though. This is one area where you're going to need a single standard if you want the printer manufacturers to write drivers for you. There needs to be one render interface, ideally at the X level so the toolkits can make use of it and one feature communication interface so that various programs can query for printer features. Queueing and spooling is already pretty well addressed.

  • While CUPS makes life easier, I still have a lot of problems with Linux. I run SuSE Linux 7.3 and have an Epson Stylus Color 800 printer connected to a networked print server (Netgear PS104). While Linux talks to the print server just fine, no matter what I try Linux takes 2 sheets of paper per page (yes, I have it configured for Letter and tried the inkjet letter settings). What is worse, however, is I get random horizontal lines on the page. Note that the output is going through Ghostscript.

    Now, with the same setup, print server, etc. I have no problems when printing from OS/2 or Windows. Furthermore I do not get the horizontal lines (so it's not a cabling problem or a problem with the print server).

    Now the Epson is a fairly common printer with well-documented control codes. I guess the only way to print properly in Linux is with a Postscript printer.
    • cups made nothing easier for me. ive had nothing but problems getting the epson stylus 740 working with it for anything other than the linux box itself. staroffice prints ok, netscape prints ok, but certain other apps will spew nothing but trash to the printer. kde's text editor wouldn't print at all. it drove me nuts *just like this keyboard with no functioning shift keys..augh*
      i couldn't print to the printer even though it was shared via samba from win2k. 98? worked fine.
      can't find anything about sharing a printer under linux to a mac, either.

      i gave up, and stuck the usb printer on my win2k server and installed the printer services. it's been somewhat stable...so far. at least i can print from the macs again.

  • Hardware is not the problem of linux printing! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tempfile ( 528337 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @04:45PM (#2745190)

    The real problem and reason why printing in Linux, esp. from the GUI, is a pain in the behind is that no distribution has a working system-wide font configuration mechanism where X and gs can painlessly access the same fonts (Recently I stated that Debian does, but it still has problems with font names with spaces in them, rendering it practically useless because many common truetype fonts have spaces in them) and the lack of a working printing toolkit. I don't know about libgnomeprint, but Qt/KDE's printing is horribly, horribly broken.

    This leads to the dilemma that GUI application developers not only have to write routines to display their data on screen, but also ones to bring everything to Postscript. Web browsers are a prime example where the screen display is complex enough so that there's no more resources left to reinvent the wheel in Postscript, leading to Mozilla's broken printing.

    The final problem is the lack of Unicode support in the ancient Postscript/Type 1 font standard. The introduction of the Euro made this painfully obvious for European Linux users.

    Before we look at the hardware, we need a reliable printing library that surpasses Postscript's stone-age encoding, rendering out every single character. I believe libgnomeprint wants to do that, but I haven't been tracking it. We need a printing system that does not rely on printer drivers that are compiled into the PS rasterizer (lpr, ugh!) or has other quirks (cups is a step forward with its modularity and two behind with its own rasterizing program, effectively introducing a separate app for PS->screen and PS->printer). The hardware support is already here, but what use is a fast car if you can't get the door open? (Don't you just love metaphors?)

    • Re:Hardware is not the problem of linux printing! (Score:4, Informative)

      by printman ( 54032 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @09:12PM (#2745953) Homepage
      Um, CUPS does not use "its own rasterizing program", it uses GNU Ghostscript with the "cups" driver which outputs a generic raster stream that can be configured as needed by the printer driver (i.e. the driver can say it needs a 6-color image at 720 DPI, and Ghostscript will generate it through the cups driver)

      We include a version of Ghostscript with CUPS because 1) most non-Linux operating systems don't come with Ghostscript pre-installed, and 2) the standard Ghostscript is bug-filled and doesn't come with that all-important cups driver compiled in. See the ESP Ghostscript project on SourceForge for a more generic replacement that can be configured with the standard Ghostscript drivers + cups.

      CUPS also provides an image file RIP which provides faster/better image printing than is possible with Ghostscript.

      Similarly, the GNOME folks could provide a rasterizer for GNOME metafiles that would be used for printing - the metafiles are generally a more compact representation than PostScript, and would provide faster printing for clients in a network configuration.

      In short, it is the very design of CUPS that will allow it to support a wide variety of devices and applications today and in the future.
  • I just installed Turboprint, and it's definitively a nice product.
    My HPDJ970C is supposed to work with cups and lpd, but I only had it work with text documents so far. Printing photographs worked, but the result was very ugly (not something that you can call a photograph) .
    Turboprint seems to print photographs as well as windows, and that's something I've been waiting for a long time.
    Plus it has a "printer toolbox" to align and clean printing heads. No more need for a Windows partition any more.
    Just one thing : what's the best piece of Linux software to use in order to properly scale photographs before printing them?

  • The power of the Dark Side (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @06:21PM (#2745489) Homepage Journal
    For once we have to give Microsoft its due. The main reason setting up a printer on is easy (or more precisely, easier than the alternatives) is that MS has gone and written (and, more importantly, tested) drivers for every printer imaginable. Granted these are not always the most reliable or most feature-complete drivers available, but most users find them adequate. Indeed MS does a better job of tracking out-of-production feature sets than HP does!

    Open Source advocates assume that Open software will always be better, in every sense, than Closed, because so many people are examining the source code. It's true that objective source code scrutiny does make better source code. But there's more to good software than absence of code errors. You need testing. Regression testing, usability testing, stress testing... MS can pay for all this because of their huge revenue stream. Development models that attempt to compete with Microsoft's closed model forget this at their peril.

  • I'm running RH 7.1, which has LPR with Printtool by default, but after many wasted hours trying to get it to print reasonably well with any of my three printers, I finally found a solution that works.

    The solution? CUPS [cups.org] with XPP [sourceforge.net]. This basically gets me all the functionality I need, with compatibility in most apps. All of my KDE apps use CUPS's LPR emulation to print. StarOffice, Mozilla, and other X apps use XPP, in which the program sends the postscript data to XPP and XPP lets me select a printer, printing options, and sends it to cupsd. If any console apps want to print, they just use CUPS's LPR emulation. Samba also integrates with CUPS, letting me share my printers.

    Setting up my printers was also a piece of cake. Downloaded & extracted the CUPS printer definitions from the website. Went to my nice CUPS admin page (http://localhost:631/) and went through the setup under "Add Printer." No config files to mess with or anything...

    The only thing I could wish for is for RedHat to use CUPS as the default printing system, as other distros like Mandrake have done. It was really a pain to rip out printtool and all the crap it leaves behind.

    Michael F. Robbins

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