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Linux in Italian schools - five months laterLinux in Italian schools - five months laterPosted Feb 2, 2006 13:37 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Linux in Italian schools - five months later by evgeny Parent article: Linux in Italian schools - five months later
Printing in Linux is still a PITA.
The problem isn't CUPS so much. It's two fold..
Try something like going and using a multi-form printer to print pages back to back and use multiple pages sizes and such. Get it working with Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp, and some Koffice applications. I expect something like that to be fairly difficult even for a advanced Linux user.
I can't blame CUPS for this because OS X uses CUPS and I've never heard any complaints about that operating system being difficult with printers. So if linux desktop uses CUPS and OS X uses CUPS and Linux desktop is very difficult and OS X is very easy, then were does the problem lie?
With that OSDL conference a while ago there was a company that was doing major conversions from Windows desktops to Linux. Something like 20000 systems or something insane like that. They said that the number one reason that they couldn't replace Windows with Linux in many situations was that in places with many different types of printers it was too difficult and expensive to get the Linux desktop to work properly. (something along those lines)
I think that the problem comes from the fact that most computer geeks and programmers don't generally give a crap about printers unless it involves printing out photos or other images for display or odd small documents here and there. I know I don't have any use for my printer. It's been months since I last touched it and I am sure the ink is dried up by now... Printing is so 'backwards' almost.
But with some businesses you are constantly printing out reports or documentation. Pretty much non-stop. When I started my current job I was amazed at just the massive amount printing and the different sorts of printing that goes on. It's just all the time. I couldn't imagine the same thing being done well with a Linux system with all the sorts of extremely non-technical people you find at a average small to medium sized business.
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Linux in Italian schools - five months later Posted Feb 2, 2006 14:18 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link] > most printers don't work
No, I'd say most printers do work. It's often the question of properly choosing a PPD. The ppd's installed with cups/foomatic/... are a minor part of the whole supported base, unfortunately.
> the desktop UI is bad
AFAIK, there is no CUPS UI (except for the web interface) as such. What you see is either KDE or Gnome add-ons.
> Get it working with Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp, and some Koffice applications.
Don't know about Koffice, but the rest you mentioned are NOT using CUPS natively - this is the real problem. Each of the above implements a (more or less) dirty wrappers around the century-old printcap/lpr stuff. Personally, in all such apps that at least allow to define an alternative to "lpr" command, I use gtklp. This helps resolving 99% of printing issues. I wish there would be as nice a distro-independent CUPS configuration utility as well. So far, setting up networking printing at home between two Ubuntu boxes was the most challenging printing configuration task I've ever undertaken (comparable only to making linux talk to a mainframe-attached IMAGEN printer 10+ years ago...). In general, I rarely share ESR's views, but this one (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html) I wholeheartedly agree with.
Linux in Italian schools - five months later Posted Feb 2, 2006 14:59 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Ya...
Most printers are going to work if they are proper printers and can take postscript.
With lower-end consumer style printers (think winmodems) produced by Brothers, Lexmark, or Cannon they are generally NOT going to work. Most HP and Epson printers will work, especially with HP stuff... but even then it's hit and miss sometimes.
This isn't so much of a problem for businesses as they get nicer printers generally, but for normal users it's very frustrating.
If you run down to the local walmart or office store and randomly buy a printer for under 150 dollars I figure you have about a 20-30% chance of having it work in linux without major headaches.
"AFAIK, there is no CUPS UI (except for the web interface) as such. What you see is either KDE or Gnome add-ons."
Exactly. CUPS is system software, not so much desktop software.
On OS X you still have the web-based CUPS ui perfectly avaible and fully functional. (at least in 10.2.x series and I expect up to 10.4.2 were its disabled, but still aviable), but 99% of Apple owners (even fairly advanced ones) are not going to even realise that that it even exists! This is because they don't have to know it exists.
They even use the same pdd files time to time and use the same text-based configuration files that Linux does. They even can use gimp-print (now gutenprint) to get higher quality drivers then those that are provided by the printer vendors themselves. This is all stuff that was developed for Linux systems that is superior to what would otherwise be aviable for OS X.
Don't think I am a OSX lover though.. I still prefer Linux despite printing issues. (like I noted before I have virtually no use for printing outside of work)
"Don't know about Koffice, but the rest you mentioned are NOT using CUPS natively - this is the real problem. Each of the above implements a (more or less) dirty wrappers around the century-old printcap/lpr stuff. Personally, in all such apps that at least allow to define an alternative to "lpr" command, I use gtklp. This helps resolving 99% of printing issues. I wish there would be as nice a distro-independent CUPS configuration utility as well."
I agree with you 100%
It's hilarious that when you go into Firefox and try to print on Linux you still find items like this for the printer preferences:
That stuff is insane.
Linux in Italian schools - five months later Posted Feb 3, 2006 3:01 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] Well, with Firefox 1.5 on Debian, I can choose between CUPS/Deskjet-950C* and PostScript/Default--so it appears things are getting better. Unfortunatly, Firefox still insists on using its custom print dialog boxes; one of the reasons I prefer to use the Epiphany browser is because it uses the standard Gnome printing system.
* a printer attached to another computer on my network, that CUPS detected and configured automatically ;)
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