I really like Jon Udell's consistent approach of applying the
scientific method to design problems. Based on the response
to Eric's sharing of his install woes for a CUPS printer, you would
think that Macs are orders of magnitude easier to install a network
printer than on Unix. Jon chose to
test
that assertion, and the results are no where near
conclusive.
As luck would have it, less than a month ago I
penned the words
CUPS and Samba
were simple to set up with webmin. While I had had some
previous experience with Samba, I had never heard of CUPS or webmin
before that date.
Time to give something back.
You see, while it is true that Aunt Tillie doesn't
know how to install a network printer, it is also true that she
doesn't know how to connect up the RCA cables on her VCR to her
television. But she does have a niece or nephew that
does. And if you are reading this, you probably are that
niece or nephew.
That means that you do know how to use Google. You know
that the web is full of pages like
this one and
this one.
In my case, my wife is running Windows XP, and my file and print
server is running Debian Linux. While I did initially
bootstrap this process using KDE's menus, webmin, and Google, I
distilled the process down to the following commands:
My hope is that six — or sixty — months from now, somebody will
stumble across this page using Google (or whatever has replaced it
by then) and find it useful.
Tangentially related, "distilling" is a great name for the technique I've always found hard to describe to others, which you describe exactly in this case:
While I did initially bootstrap this process using KDE's menus, webmin, and Google, I distilled the process down to the following commands [...]
Distilling is the technique of using interactive tools (disk/network/system admin, process/data modeling, GUI builders) to work through a task and then capturing just the essence of the task in commands/code, which can then be more easily cut-n-pasted, reused, parameterized, version controlled, annotated, wrapped in control structures, etc. Some interactive tools (Veritas, AIX' SMIT, Tk GUI builders) provide their command equivalents directly, making distillation easier.
Windows XP can talk IPP directly, so you really don't need Samba. It's
kinda hard to spot, and I tried setting up Samba to print (and failed,
actually) a few times before I noticed.
When installing a "Network Printer", simply change the checkbox from
"Type the printer name, or click next to browse" to "Enter the address
of a printer on your intranet or the Internet"
Then you enter the printer URL, which under cups looks something like
http:// followed by printhost:631/printers/printername (sorry, got bitten
by your mangler)
The only quirk is that Windows wants to do all of the driver conversion
stuff itself before it sends to CUPS, so you have to enable raw printing
in CUPS and install a suitable printer driver on the Windows box.
FYI: this is part of a larger script that I actively use to reconfigure a box that I have installed from scratch. In that script I combine this apt-get with the previous one to do both together. However, for the purposes of sharing it with others, I split out samba for emphasis (and screwing it up in the process ;-))
David Watson: I started writing this as a comment to Don Park's piece which is a reaction to ESR's piece on open source UI. I thought ESR's piece was really good in that it patiently unearthed the difficulties of such software. Sam Ruby covered John...
David Watson: I started writing this as a comment to Don Park's piece which is a reaction to ESR's piece on open source UI. I thought ESR's piece was really good in that it patiently unearthed the difficulties of such software. Sam Ruby covered John...
I started writing this as a comment to Don Park's piece which is a reaction to ESR's piece on open source UI. I thought ESR's piece was really good in that it patiently unearthed the difficulties of such software. Sam Ruby covered John Udell's...
It started with a hard drive failure. On a machine that is between three and four years old. It ended with me spending a half day installing not one, but two operating systems. And being pleasantly surprised how smoothly it went. In the decades that...
[more]
As luck would have it, less than a month ago I
penned the words
CUPS and Samba
were simple to set up with webmin. While I had had some
previous experience with Samba, I had never heard of CUPS or webmin
before that date.
You see, while it is true that Aunt Tillie doesn't
know how to install a network printer, it is also true that she
doesn't know how to connect up the RCA cables on her VCR to her
television. But she does have a niece or nephew that
does. And if you are reading this, you probably are that
niece or nephew.