Ubuntu, Cups, and Grandsons
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| penguinist Nov 12, 2008 6:56 PM EDT |
I was a bit late on the scene with Ubuntu, having been a Fedora/RedHat guy all these years, but with the release of the 8.10 Beta I tried it out. Nice! What I especially appreciated was the responsibility that the Ubuntu folks have taken for putting together a distribution that "just works". No tweaking needed, just a few minutes of installation and voila... now you have a ready-to-use fast-booting system complete with working video, sound, Wifi and Ethernet. As a test, I handed an Ubuntu CD to my 11 year old grandson, pointed him at an old P4 system that I had laying around and handed him an empty 40GB drive, and told him that if he could get the computer to run, then the computer was his! Being suitably motivated, he did the installation himself with little help and few questions. Soon he was exploring the repositories checking out some of the 26,000 programs available for installation. I think this new breed of simplified distributions, like Ubuntu, has the potential to position Linux to become the preferred OS of the masses. How does all this relate to cups? Well, when it came to cups, Ubuntu also left me wanting. My Brother MFC-640CW printer has a working Linux driver that is downloadable from the Brother site and is manually installable. That's fine for me as a computer professional, but it's clearly beyond the scope of my 11 year old, and I dare say beyond the scope of most windows upgraders. If Linux is to become the preferred OS of the masses, then we need to be taking a cue from the Ubuntu philosophy to make Linux Printing "just work". |
| Steven_Rosenber Nov 12, 2008 9:37 PM EDT |
Re: Printing, what I have to do in Ubuntu AND Debian to get my el-cheapo HP LaserJet 1020 printer to work verges on barbaric. The system detects the printer in both cases and picks a driver, but nothing will print. I had to go here: http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/ and do a whole lot of compiling. It wasn't that hard, and my printer then did work in Debian (I never did try it in Ubuntu). This was six months ago, and much to my non-surprise, when I tried to print from my new, updated Ubuntu 8.04 install a week ago, the printer was again auto-detected, the driver chosen, but again nothing would print. You'd think that the CUPS developers, if not the good people at HP would want their printers to work with Linux -- especially Ubuntu. I'll have to see how this process goes in CentOS 5.2 ... |
| NoDough Nov 13, 2008 10:56 AM EDT |
I just installed Ubuntu 8.10 on a laptop in a corporate environment. For the first time in any Linux I can configure dual monitors and they are detected and work appropriately. For the first time in any Linux I can configure my WPA, hidden SSID wireless and it works appropriately. Ubuntu found all 8 network printers at this location and the HPLJ 4250 which I chose installed and worked first try. I did have to run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to get Compiz working. I may install and try Likewise Open later if I get time. |
| ColonelPanik Nov 13, 2008 11:25 AM EDT |
But 8.10 is the pits, just read this:
http://www.linuxloop.com/news/2008/11/12/how-ubuntu-lost-its... I really have had nothing but success with 8.10. Ubuntu must have something going for it besides hype. |
| bigg Nov 13, 2008 12:01 PM EDT |
I'm still having trouble with Ubuntu on nVidia cards. Any other distro, be it Fedora or Slackware or Debian or Puppy or ..., they all work. Ubuntu doesn't. Ubuntu is great with hardware except for those of us for whom it's not. My wife's new laptop with Intel wireless and graphics, on the other hand, it's an incredible experience. |
| ColonelPanik Nov 13, 2008 12:47 PM EDT |
System>Administration>Hardware Drivers That should automagically get those nVidia cards working. I am pleased with 8.10 but the truth is I would be running Debian if the nvVidia card would have worked. |
| happyfeet Nov 13, 2008 2:06 PM EDT |
No problems with Sabayon here with my nVidia GS 7800. CUPS works for my HP PSC 1610 - as long as I remember to turn the printer on first :-) |
| dinotrac Nov 13, 2008 2:27 PM EDT |
Ah yes, Ubuntu. I've only had 3 Ubuntu boxes, and half a dozen different flavors of Ubuntu (assorted releases of Ubuntu, Ubuntu server, Kubuntu, and mythbuntu), so I am probably not qualified to say anything, but... Ubuntu rocks when it works, sucks when it doesn't. Assorted little Ubuntisms conspire to make me pull my hair out when I need to do something that doesn't just work out of the boxes. I am, admittedly, more comfortable with the SuSE that's been on my personal workstation for years (although 9.X almost made me throw THAT out), but... Linux should be Linux -- you should not have to launch an all out search and destroy to fix things up that are straightforward on other distros. |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 13, 2008 5:06 PM EDT |
Yeah, dino is right. Ubuntu is a nightmare when something breaks because it needs to be solved "the ubuntu way" instead of the regular way that debian and other systems work. There's a ton of little snatches hiding under the hood (e.g. apt-get dist-upgrade is broken). But if it works, it works really well. |
| gus3 Nov 13, 2008 9:52 PM EDT |
But even "the Debian way" is still sufficiently different from "tradition" (meaning "what I've done for the past N years") that there are specialized tutorials on how to set up a desktop system "the Debian way." Not just getting GNOME up and running, but how to get the system on the Internet so that you can install GNOME. No thanks. |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 14, 2008 6:27 AM EDT |
Given the wide spread of Debian and its derivatives I find that less onerous than the "Ubuntu way". Besides, on Debian the "traditional" way usually works as well, though you may run into a snag down the road come upgrade time. On Ubuntu some things are left broken (such as upgrading through apt). |
| penguinist Nov 14, 2008 8:30 AM EDT |
That is the tradeoff isn't it. One philosophy is to do everything as transparently as possible without "bothering" the user with a lot of questions during the installation. Hide the details to make the installation easy. The other philosophy is to expose the user to the details of configuration. The user does more work up front, but ends up having explicit control over the behavior of their system. So, for me, that means that I won't hand a Fedora DVD to my Grandson, and I won't install Ubuntu on my servers. |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 14, 2008 11:18 AM EDT |
The third option is do simply do it both right, but that takes up resources. The early Ubuntus are good examples of this. The user friendliness was much better than most distros at that time, yet under the hood everything still worked in the standard and debian way. |
| herzeleid Nov 14, 2008 3:14 PM EDT |
> So, for me, that means that I won't hand a Fedora DVD to my Grandson, and I won't install Ubuntu on my servers. hmm, I detect a non-sequitur here. Have you ever seen ubuntu server? |
| gus3 Nov 14, 2008 3:43 PM EDT |
@penguinist: I would be very interested to know what your 11-y-o grandson could do with a Slackware installation CD. It's on the total other end of ease-vs-control spectrum. |
| rijelkentaurus Nov 14, 2008 5:08 PM EDT |
@gus, it's not the other side of the ease-vs-control spectrum, IMO. It does take a little more skill to run Slackware, but really it just takes a little more patience. |
| Steven_Rosenber Nov 14, 2008 8:56 PM EDT |
I just configured a networked HP LaserJet 4250 in Debian Etch with CUPS. Works perfectly. I think that the HP 1020 problem has something to do with it being a USB printer and not a networked printer. |
| ColonelPanik Nov 14, 2008 11:36 PM EDT |
We did have the HP 1020 Networked with two PCLOS laptops and a desktop
running Debian. Well it was networked for a couple of days at least. Our HP LaserJet 4plus is a parallel port printer but we have had it working out of a USB slot. Messy but possible. |
| jdixon Nov 15, 2008 8:03 PM EDT |
> I would be very interested to know what your 11-y-o grandson could do with a Slackware installation CD. Assuming your partitions are already created, the Slackware install is pretty much as simple as any other Linux install. The only real problems might come in setting up lilo, and even there the defaults should work for most people. It's the after install configuration which is slightly harder with Slackware. And even there it's only slightly harder than the "user friendly" distributions. |
| penguinist Nov 15, 2008 10:32 PM EDT |
@herzeleid: > Have you ever seen ubuntu server? The Ubuntu folks, you know, have put out a "server CD" which has no X, and installs LAMP by default. I tried it out, but was not to happy with the automatic manipulation of initrd. For me, a server application needs to be explicitly controlled and it made me nervous to see the initrd changing while doing routine updates. The "magic" is fine for the grandchildren, but for servers I want to know explicitly what is happening and have the ability to change and tweak with precision. I did like the idea in Ubuntu to put busybox in the boot environment. Nice idea. This is something that all distributions could/should add. Actually, I'm not happy either with Fedora's handling of initrd. It is much too difficult and time consuming to add an extra boot-time driver if you have a hardware configuration with a rare scsi controller, for example. @gus3: Sorry, I have no experience with Slackware, so I can't comment. |
| herzeleid Nov 16, 2008 2:01 AM EDT |
> The Ubuntu folks, you know, have put out a "server CD" which has no X, and installs LAMP by default. True, it doesn't install X by default. However, it also doesn't install a lamp stack by default either. My little firewall/dns/dhcp server doesn't have the resources to do lamp. > I tried it out, but was not to happy with the automatic manipulation of initrd. I didn't see anything wrong with their handling of initrd. But if you are averse to change, I can guarantee you one way to avoid change: Don't change anything, don't arrange for anything to be changed, and you'll have perfect stability. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!