Network printing
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:
apt-get --yes install cupsys cupsys-bsd cupsys-client foomatic-filters-ppds lpadmin -p IBM4312 -D "IBM Network Printer 12" -L Office -v parallel:/dev/lp0 -P /usr/share/cups/model/foomatic-ppds/Generic/Generic-PCL_4_Printer-laserjet.ppd.gz /usr/bin/enable IBM4312 /usr/sbin/accept IBM4312 # lp /usr/share/cups/data/testprint.ps apt-get --yes install samba patch /etc/samba/smb.conf /home/setup/patch/smb.conf /etc/init.d/samba restart mkdir -p /home/rubyc useradd -d /home/rubyc -p XXXXXXXX rubyc smbpasswd -a rubyc XXXXXXXX adduser --quiet rubyc staff smbpasswd rubys XXXXXXXX adduser --quiet rubys staff
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.
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.
Posted by Martin Atkins ats/apt-get --yes samba/apt-get --yes install samba/
Otherwise, thanks!
Posted by Mark A. Hershberger atMark: fixed, thanks!
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 ;-))
Posted by Sam Ruby atEverybody Weighs In On Open Source UI
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...Excerpt from Jeff's Radio Weblog at
Everybody Weighs In On Open Source UI
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...Excerpt from Jeff's Radio Weblog at
Everybody Weighs In On Open Source UI
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...Excerpt from www.davidwatson.org at
Hard Drive Failure
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]Trackback from Sam Ruby at
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:
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.
"Distillation", I like it.
Posted by Ken MacLeod at