The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I've just gone through the experience of trying to configure CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. It has proved a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Unix. This is all the more frustrating because the developers of CUPS have obviously tried hard to produce an accessible system -- but the best intentions and effort have led to a system which despite its superficial pseudo-friendliness is so undiscoverable that it might as well have been written in ancient Sanskrit."
Posted Feb 26, 2004 21:38 UTC (Thu)
by pksings (guest, #93)
[Link] (16 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 0:02 UTC (Fri)
by schwaang (guest, #19827)
[Link]
The meta-problem here is that the configuration wizard does all the approved rituals ... but doesn't have the central attribute these are supposed to achieve: discoverability. That is, the quality that every point in the interface has prompts and actions attached to it from which you can learn what to do next. Does your project have this quality?
I'd extend his 5 question critique at the end of the article:
1. What does my software look like to a non-technical user who has never seen it before?
It is a developer attitude issue, and everyone needs to get on board. Plenty of projects suffer from this.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 0:38 UTC (Fri)
by allesfresser (guest, #216)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:27 UTC (Fri)
by mmarq (guest, #2332)
[Link] (2 responses)
??? What about Linuxprinting.org ? where does it fit ?...
Posted Feb 27, 2004 6:55 UTC (Fri)
by gtaylor6 (guest, #19812)
[Link] (1 responses)
As for where we fit in: CUPS (and printing software in general) is heavily dependent on printer So, LP.org hosts the canonical collection of non-ps printer metadata, as As a handy side-effect, there is a set of semi-intolerable support Grant Taylor - founder, linuxprinting.org
Posted Feb 27, 2004 17:01 UTC (Fri)
by mmarq (guest, #2332)
[Link]
Since its "Linuxprinting" it could be a good idea to pass the foomatic engine to inside of kernel space... i mean only the lower driver engine that foomatic represents (with the "per printer driver" in userspace or ring 1 as an example), and not the rasterizers, filters or spoolers... That could represent a small fork in the actual code base, but an added improvement to security, debugging... and specialy an added improvement in gray areas and confusion concerning the status of licence of the code... ...and who knows?, part of a really advanced Human Iinterface for Open-source software(printers need human interventin anyway).
Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:14 UTC (Fri)
by mmarq (guest, #2332)
[Link] (9 responses)
But instead of do or do not recommend, you could have offered your services... Of course windows world is full of warez and "free" copys, and people really avoid to pay for anything, so price of software, with or without Open Source, is not a issue to the "outside entreprise" masses of "M$ The sucess is not that much, yet, and outside of entreprises is even less, and is really missed intuitive GUI interfaces for the configuration of those superior Open Source applications, that will probably only flud when there will be a meta-toolkit or a kind of Moz XUL that could work with the majority of GUI toolkits out there... "But never the less, time and excelence is clearly on the Open Source side, inspite of all the hurdles of cryptic configurations"
Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:50 UTC (Fri)
by coolian (guest, #14818)
[Link] (8 responses)
So, if you care to be heard, you really have to improve the spelling and grammar or people will just skip to the next post.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 17:04 UTC (Fri)
by mmarq (guest, #2332)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 17:28 UTC (Fri)
by irios (guest, #19838)
[Link] (4 responses)
So, if you care to be heard, you really have to improve your geography and history and wake up to the fact that there ARE people that natively speak other languages than English. Wise up, or people will just ignore you, as you deserve, and skip to the next post. ¡Piérdete, cretino!
Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:11 UTC (Fri)
by razholio (guest, #5706)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:12 UTC (Fri)
by allesfresser (guest, #216)
[Link] (1 responses)
In any case, I don't think prejudice has anything to do with it. Correct grammar and spelling are good things, and should be encouraged.
Posted Feb 28, 2004 23:54 UTC (Sat)
by oki (guest, #19862)
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Posted Feb 28, 2004 9:51 UTC (Sat)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
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Posted Mar 1, 2004 19:42 UTC (Mon)
by crouchet (guest, #1084)
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I'm American and English is my first language. I did not have much difficulty understanding the original message and I do appreciate the effort. Thanks, and please don't stop posting. This tangent, however, is off topic and was unnecessary. I feel all of the posts to it -- including this one -- are a waste of time. If you have difficulty reading a post then just skip it; you won't learn any less than if it was never posted. Spare the rest of us the wasted time of reading your complaint. JC
Posted Mar 4, 2004 10:48 UTC (Thu)
by ekj (guest, #1524)
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Oddly, most of the americans that critisize my third language (english) are themselves unable to write similarily well in their *second* language. Wake up and smell the coffee. The entire world does *not* have english as their mothertongue. Most foreigners who gets flamed for grammar or spelling on international fora, are infact *much* better in english than the average american is in anything-but-english. (If you want to dispute this -- feel free to do so in *your* third language.) I realize I'm being a little inflammatory here, I'm sorry, I know *most* people (american or not) don't do this. But some do. And they need to grow up.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:27 UTC (Fri)
by cpm (guest, #3554)
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For *all* of the folks close to me, I have installed Linux, of Much easier to deal with than other options I have suffered I'm very happy setting up "joe sixpack" with a linux box. And so are they, though they often don't know it. Their
Posted Feb 26, 2004 21:39 UTC (Thu)
by NZheretic (guest, #409)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 21:49 UTC (Thu)
by trimble (guest, #5112)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 21:59 UTC (Thu)
by elanthis (guest, #6227)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 6:10 UTC (Fri)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link] (3 responses)
Let me get this straight. You say that the problem is that ESR is not familiar enough with the tool? Are you bleeping kidding me? If ESR has trouble figuring it out, how do you expect a random member of the general public to figure it out? This shouldn't be rocket science; under the hood, CUPS has packets traversing your local net announcing what printers are available. It should be a trivial matter to configure a printer with no skill whatsoever, without R-ing any F-ing M. It should be too simple to need an M.
Some have claimed that ESR should be blaming Red Hat for this one, others CUPS, but what's not in doubt is that there is a problem.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 12:15 UTC (Fri)
by mem (guest, #517)
[Link] (1 responses)
Aunt Tellie? Yes, CUPS is for your aunt, but I won't believe you if you tell me your aunt has several printers connected to several computers at home. I'm in fact wondering why this piece was "published", what's the difference betwen Joe User ranting because he doesn't read docs and ESR ranting because he doesn't read docs?
Posted Feb 27, 2004 14:31 UTC (Fri)
by piman (guest, #8957)
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One of those rants comes from the barrel of a gun.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:39 UTC (Fri)
by allesfresser (guest, #216)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 11:03 UTC (Fri)
by hensema (guest, #980)
[Link] (7 responses)
Sadly, the 'not familiar'-argument is used waaaay to often for tools you only use once. Seriously, when I told a Debian user that the Debian installer was too difficult to use, be replied by saying "yes, but you only install debian once". Think about it. Shouldn't the Debian installer be extremely user frienly, simply because it is meant to be used only once? (substitute 'Debian installer' for about any installer or configurator)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 14:23 UTC (Fri)
by jorvalho (guest, #2623)
[Link] (5 responses)
Because "regular" end users should not have to install an operating system. Nobody ever thinks of having to install windows. At least not your "aunt tillie". It comes with the computer. If your new computer came with Debian pre-installed, all you had to do from that moment on was upgrade with APT.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 14:35 UTC (Fri)
by AAP (guest, #721)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:39 UTC (Fri)
by tomsi (subscriber, #2306)
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This is the ideal world. In the real world - the Windows people end up reinstalling Windows far too often (even when using XP). I agree that all seldomly used programs should be easy to use, but I don't mind having an advanced mode, letting you do all kind of stuff.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:50 UTC (Fri)
by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
[Link] (2 responses)
But regular users may very reasonably want to add printer access to their system, or add it to a network which already has a printer somewhere. > If your new computer came with Debian pre-installed, all you had to do from > that moment on was upgrade with APT. They might just possibly also want to alter configurations of various sorts. The whole point of the article was that tools intended to assist this process far too often make it harder instead.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 18:04 UTC (Fri)
by jcollardx01 (guest, #13784)
[Link] (1 responses)
I've been programming for 15 years on DOS/Windows boxes, yet it took me this long to get a simple menu item working. If I were to contribute to Linux... It would be on a documentation project.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:41 UTC (Fri)
by allesfresser (guest, #216)
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Then please do... as you can see, it's badly needed.
Posted Feb 28, 2004 10:14 UTC (Sat)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
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Sadly, the 'not familiar'-argument is used waaaay to often for tools you only use once. Seriously, when I told a Debian user that the Debian installer was too difficult to use, be replied by saying "yes, but you only install debian once". Think about it. Shouldn't the Debian installer be extremely user frienly, simply because it is meant to be used only once? That's a non sequiter. The Debian user didn't tell you that the problem was that you weren't familiar with it; he told you that it was a minor problem in the long run. Sure the Debian installer should be extremely user friendly, but it takes a lot of work to make a good installer that runs on all the machines Debian installs on. It's also not something that developers use every day. A lot of developers like to work on making Debian better in their day-to-day usage ("scratching their itch") instead of something they rarely see. As a user, as well as a small-time developer, time spent on making things work I use day to day is more helpful then time spent on making something work I use once every couple years.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 21:50 UTC (Thu)
by jonathanbearak (guest, #8861)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:07 UTC (Thu)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (1 responses)
An interesting point about this is that it's broadly similar to the way that you would do the same thing on Windows. Under Windows, local printers default to being unshared, and the administrator has to take the positive step of sharing the printer before it becomes available to others. Having configured a lot more networked printers under Windows than under Linux- I run Linux at home, so my printers there generally don't need to be shared- that would have been the first thing that I would have tried to check. I'd guess that most people used to Windows GUI configuration tools would have felt the same way. Ironically, that means that this job might very well have been easier for a newbie who had only used Windows before than it was for uberhacker ESR.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 0:14 UTC (Fri)
by sandy_pond (guest, #9734)
[Link]
BTW my Dad bought a second Windows computer and wireless router for his home. The salesperson told him all he needed to do is plug them together. He managed to get both computers talking to the Internet but that was all. He couldn't figure on his own how to share a printer or files.
As most computer users he was really missing very basic networking concepts.
Posted Feb 29, 2004 9:39 UTC (Sun)
by scmason (guest, #19869)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:00 UTC (Thu)
by libra (guest, #2515)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 6:04 UTC (Fri)
by conman (guest, #14830)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:04 UTC (Thu)
by Ross (guest, #4065)
[Link] (12 responses)
I'd also like to say that sending out periodic broadcasts is highly
Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:20 UTC (Thu)
by dang (guest, #310)
[Link] (6 responses)
And his point is well taken. For most users, usability is real measure of success.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:07 UTC (Thu)
by Ross (guest, #4065)
[Link] (5 responses)
My point was that he's placing blame on them when the software might have
Posted Feb 27, 2004 21:49 UTC (Fri)
by ren_123 (guest, #19852)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Feb 28, 2004 0:41 UTC (Sat)
by piman (guest, #8957)
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Instead, he coded... Fetchmail. Which is, to be honest, not that great a piece of code (though it does work). But its configuration UI, Fetchmailconf, is one of the worst UIs I have ever used in any operating system. Ever.
Posted Feb 28, 2004 8:46 UTC (Sat)
by Ross (guest, #4065)
[Link] (2 responses)
1) The CUPS developers didn't knock his teeth out. They committed the 2) I'm not speaking for the CUPS developers so I have no idea if they 3) Yes, in fact being polite tends to get you better results because 4) He's bitching about the wrong people anyway since they didn't create 5) He shouldn't be one to complain about user interfaces unless he's 6) If he really wanted to get it fixed he would have submitted a bug
Posted Feb 28, 2004 11:55 UTC (Sat)
by ren_123 (guest, #19852)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 29, 2004 21:28 UTC (Sun)
by Ross (guest, #4065)
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2) Those reactions weren't written by ESR were they? I'm talking about 3) Did I say they weren't listening to complaints? Did I say they 4) He's barking up the wrong tree so maybe he should bark up the right one. 6) Once again you mischaracterize what I said. I said that he chose a
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:07 UTC (Thu)
by allesfresser (guest, #216)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:12 UTC (Thu)
by Ross (guest, #4065)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 18:49 UTC (Fri)
by Ross (guest, #4065)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 12:38 UTC (Fri)
by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
[Link] (1 responses)
That aside, I must confess that I've found printing under Linux and in fact other UNIXes to be a nightmare of badly documented and quirky software. Of course, other OSes don't seem enough better. Windows gains from having vendor-supplied drivers and an interface designed to do simple things easily - but becomes awful as soon as you need to get something not-so-obvious done. MacOS - nice interface, too bad about the backend - especially lpr printing.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 18:46 UTC (Fri)
by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:20 UTC (Thu)
by shredwheat (guest, #4188)
[Link] (14 responses)
The problem is there are too many tools and none of them are good. You can find documentation for one tool but it doesn't quite work with another. For all the things linux can autodetect and use, printers is not one of them. Which seems strange because I've never seen Windows have problem detecting and using printers for the past decade. I thought these issues were solved? Luckily there is a windows machine in the house. Not there's any chance of setting up remote samba printing (try, read docs, try, read docs, try, give up). It's emberrassing to transfer files and print remotely, but it works and I'll take it. To be honest I'm on Debian, which doesn't directly come with printer tools. But I've already installed no end of foomatics and "gui helpers". You've got to know another language to even get through the odd CUPS web tool. A language it appears there is no help for. For the love of all things, a simple HOWTO would be welcome, but nothing was available when I was searching a year or so ago.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:37 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:08 UTC (Thu)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link] (10 responses)
KDE's KDEprint is a true miracle. It just works. However, that comes after CUPS is already set up. I am mentioning it because SUSE has cunningly neglected to talk about CUPS passwords, and you can only fully use the KDEprint GUI after you have and know a CUPS password. Finding out about the password requires an act of ancient magic. Eric is describing a Fedora problem as far as I can tell. It doesn't sound as though he was using a CUPS-shipped tool in the first place. He's bashing the wrong people. He did find the CUPS GUI, though, it seems, which is html based and clean as far as I remember. How well does it work? I don't know.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:18 UTC (Thu)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link]
It is not only the developers of a project which need to ship proper docs. Much rather it is the fault of too many too fragmented distribution config tools which are written _instead_ of using the originally shipped GUI. Each distro replacing CUPS's default GUI with its homegrown one means (a) less exposure and bugfixing for the actual project The fact that we have a plethora of mutually inconsistent setup tools from each distro is a marketing disaster and a clear weakness of "Linux" as a whole.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:38 UTC (Fri)
by hijab (guest, #4134)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:53 UTC (Fri)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link]
This is better than it used to be - to reset the printer status, editing something evil in /etc/cups/bla bla was a valid way out. No longer, thanks to kdeprint, but for the password, I had to read some man pages. Anyhow, CUPS works beautifully, but kdeprint really is a killer interface! _That_ really solved my Linux printing problems, in everyday use, which is much better than just the setup issue - it simply does the job!
Posted Feb 27, 2004 9:50 UTC (Fri)
by irios (guest, #19838)
[Link] (6 responses)
Well, *maybe* if the printer is connected directly to her computer, and she ain't sharing it with anybody, and won't go beyond basic printing. But if she wants to share her printer on the WiFi with her sister Ada, YAST will do nothing to mitigate the NIGHTMARE. Whoever has tried to configure CUPS must have missed a grimoire even more than clear and concise documentation. Somebody abobe says that printers are a pain under any OS. Well, it is a very sad fact that they are a REAL PAIN in the ... under Linux, but under windows THEY ARE NOT A PAIN AT ALL: plug them on a server, plug them on a workstation, and GO. Want to print? Go. Want colour? Click and go. Want hires? Click and go. Want double sided? Click and go. There *have* been improvements in printing: at least, local printing is easy to achieve with modern distributions, even though the user interface leaves A LOT to be desired, with multiple queues for the same printer, multiple mays to watch these queues, and multiple ways to configure them, all af them not so subtly different, and not necessarily interoperable. Not an Elm Street nightmare anymore (maybe), but one of those "i'm naked in the street and everyone is watching" nightmare nonetheless.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 12:51 UTC (Fri)
by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
[Link] (1 responses)
As it happens, my personal experience of printing under Linux has been very bad, too - all sorts of issues with PostScript mangling (esp from Macs), no user feedback on job status, the usual obsession with the non-standard US Letter paper size, jobs failing silently, difficulty cancelling jobs, etc. Alas, little I've been able to pin down as hard bugs and report usefully. I do think a distro-independent GUI for CUPS (other than the web interface) would be a welcome change. Also desparately needed is a printing status monitor and notification system - perhaps hook it into D-BUS, with a "print monitor" app to monitor and control things? That way you could also have panel applets in GNOME/KDE for "at a glance" status, and you could also enable applications to monitor the status of print jobs they've submitted. Better feedback from locally and remotely connected printers is also very important, and very lacking under current linux print systems. Overall, I think that printing on every OS I've ever worked with has been totally crap, and I regularly wish I could simply get rid of the damnn printers entirely.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:38 UTC (Fri)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 14:03 UTC (Fri)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link] (3 responses)
I am not Aunt Tillie, but I have never had an easier printer install under Linux that SUSE 9.0 .
Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:53 UTC (Fri)
by irios (guest, #19838)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 17:08 UTC (Fri)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link]
About the plethora of different print tools: I think the problem is that SUSE, like everyone else, first invents their own tools, and second leaves all the KDE tools (printing manager in particular) hanging around. So, there is confusing redundancy. They would be much better advised to focus on _one_ common infrastructure (KDE) and polish that, rather than roll their own. However, I suppose then there is a separate structure for Gnome, and Xfce, and and and. Fragmentation killed Unix, and it burdens Linux.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 21:53 UTC (Fri)
by hijab (guest, #4134)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:39 UTC (Thu)
by au79 (guest, #16869)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 5:23 UTC (Fri)
by Webexcess (guest, #197)
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A little more than a year ago I was driven up the wall by the same interface you and ESR are complaining about. I'm certainly not an expert, but when I finally got it working I channeled my anger into writing a howto for Printing with Debian and Windows. It avoids GUI tools and has worked for at least a couple of people.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:20 UTC (Thu)
by Lemmy (guest, #19822)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:21 UTC (Thu)
by ccchips (subscriber, #3222)
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However, I'm glad we *have* such a powerful and useful printing system, and hope that these issues get resolved, however incrementally. I'm seeing similar issues with ALSA as well. Sometimes I think part of the problem is the voluntary nature of all this. I keep toying with the idea of becoming a volunteer documenter, but I have such little time. I'd almost have to come up with a way to hook a computer to my brain and wirelessy work on the documentation while commuting to and from work.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:22 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
ESR is right, every developer should take the software they write and get someone who knows nothing about it and just sit and watch waht they do to try and use the software. when they get really stuck (not just stalled for a little bit, let them try for help before stepping in). the purpose of stepping in isn't to get thigns going, but to try and gather info about problems further on in the software. the hard part of this is that after doing a few trials like this that particular user will no longer be suitable for this sort of testing (they will have learned how you do things) those who remember the heyday of Heathkit may remember that they did this type of thing with their kits and a person who got into their testing program would only go a handful of 'Beginner' level kits before they were considered 'to experianced' to be a valid test for them and had to move up to testing the next more complicated kits. This type of testing (and fixing the issues they find) would do wonders for software useability. and by the way I don't exempt myself from having this problem. I have been guilty of producing software that seemed perfectly obvious to run (to me) and I couldn't understand why people were having so much trouble with it until I actually saw someone trying to use it and realized that they had missed the fundamantal structure of the software.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 22:39 UTC (Thu)
by sed_and_awk (guest, #19483)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 3:05 UTC (Fri)
by bulbul (guest, #19829)
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Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:11 UTC (Thu)
by alethia (guest, #19826)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:17 UTC (Fri)
by alonzo (guest, #2770)
[Link]
I agree that MAN is usful[sic]..... but,,, man WHAT??? On my Mandrake 9.1 box a 'man -k print | wc -l' returned 437!! And,,, the printer configuration should be consistant across distributions. -- alonzo
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:22 UTC (Thu)
by grant (guest, #10894)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:30 UTC (Fri)
by mmarq (guest, #2332)
[Link]
But how could it be other way, if "free" wants to take over the world ? I mean IPP is well positionet (IMO) to take over the old "Fax" infrastructure as VoIP is positioned to take over the old "Telefony" (look at asterisk) infrastructure. I predict that in 10 years entraprises only have one cable suplier and all theirs communications traffic will go over IP. ... and i do a lot of free tips and advice, too many in my opinion, to local users interested in the Open Source technologies, much more than in international forums... but i really cant see how is possible to avoid a lot of pain to the common users wanting to tackle this issues... Software and OSes are really getting much more complex than a car, as often stated.
Posted Feb 26, 2004 23:28 UTC (Thu)
by macemoneta (guest, #2717)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 15:08 UTC (Fri)
by jonth (guest, #4008)
[Link]
Basically, W2K and above support IPP, as does CUPS. The tricky bit is knowing the URL to use for the printer. The answer? In my case: http://<hostname>:631/printers/<printername> Note that ipp://... doesn't work. The bit that held me up for an hour was I'd subconciously added an extra "/" at the end of the URL. Windows just kept choking on this. I realised my mistake when I was browsing the CUPS web interface, and noticed that the printer status page for my printer was http://<hostname>:631/printers/<printername>/ Given that this clearly resulted in a webpage being returned, it couldn't possibly be a termination point for IPP, right? Checking the CUPS IPP documentation showed they didn't use a trailing "/", so I tried it without, and it worked. However, I did have to manually edit the CUPS config to allow other hosts on my subnet to access CUPS, and I have to largely agree with ESRs comments on a general level. I use Linux almost exclusively at home, but wouldn't dream of getting my extended family to change - I spend enough time sorting out their Windows problems. Until I can take them through all the configuration issues they have over a phone (and that means using a GUI, not an editor) Linux ain't gonna happen with them. Jonth
Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:06 UTC (Fri)
by dank (guest, #1865)
[Link]
For anyone wondering, here's how: This might or might not be ok (what good is lpoptions if
Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:27 UTC (Fri)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 2:16 UTC (Fri)
by eyal (subscriber, #949)
[Link]
ESR may be right that CUPS, or a multitude of other open source tools, don't have good enough UI, documentatiion, and whatever other parts avergae end-users might need. However, I think it's better the way it is. I think it's better that kernel developers, CUPS developers, or for that matter developers of any infrastructure software, remain focused on producing technically best of breed solutions, and leave UI to someone else. Looking at the Windoze analogy again, M$ licenses many pieces of software from other companies, wraps them in a UI shell and incorporates them into Windoze. Neither ESR nor aunt Tillie would ever have any complaint to the developers of those internal modules, because M$ is the front end. It is the job of the distributions to pick and choose the pieces they deem to be best, wrap them in installation and configuration shells, provide aunt-Tillie-oriented documentation, support forums, etc. And indeed, many of the distribution do a fine job, to the point they let average users install a powerful workstation, connect it to a local network, share files and printers with Linux and Windows machines, and do pretty much everything else. Some people above commented about SUSE's Yast configuration tool, I have good experience with Mandrake from version 8.0 and it's getting easier and better every few months (by now it's easier than any Windows setup...). I'm sure there are many other distributions that can handle print sharing configuration easily and smoothly. So, let it be this way. It's more efficient to have techincally minded projects remain technically minded, and let distributions do what they do best - build end-user distributions. It's not just technically more efficient, but it also creates a better market structure and provides business opportunities around Linux and free software. Eyal.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 2:41 UTC (Fri)
by rloomans (guest, #759)
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Posted Feb 27, 2004 3:04 UTC (Fri)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (2 responses)
Ever clicked on the Cancel button? CUPS often gets wedged (especially if it's a big doc or going over the network). Because it never prints any error messages (just helpful web pages like "client-error-forbidden"), it gives you no clue as to what went wrong or how to fix it. *I* submitted the job, why should I be forbidden from cancelling it?? More than once I've purged all traces of CUPS from my system and reinstalled from scratch just to get my printer working again. (Simply clearing the queue and restarting CUPS doesn't do it). I REFUSE to learn the inner workings of my print spooler. It's stupid that I have to babysit CUPS every few months. I asked about the crappy error messages three years ago, and the reply was that they were stalled on the internationalization and it should be fixed in six months. Ha. Unfortunately, lprng also requires deep knowledge to set up and use. Printing on other platforms is trivial -- I don't know why Linux insists on making it so hard. For once, I actually agree with ESR.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 4:46 UTC (Fri)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link]
You do seem to know about CUPS, though; enough to have found the deadlock which
Posted Feb 27, 2004 12:55 UTC (Fri)
by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
[Link]
The error reporting in the low-level CUPS apps _does_ need a lot of work. That said - in fairness, most of the time it does it's job very well.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 5:50 UTC (Fri)
by jdl (guest, #14995)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 7:13 UTC (Fri)
by vatsal (guest, #19833)
[Link] (1 responses)
they are developing all that software because of their love for writing software, when that software is in a proper functional state(according to their expectations) they start losing interest in that(and thats natural as their first love is writing software, not documenting it), they just want to handle complex programming problems instead of firing an editor and writing about how the whole thing works. To them "Documentation" is kind of "shitty" work which no one wants to do, and thats where money comes in picture, in closed source or professional organizations you have to write documentation, you like it or not. and often you have dedicated guys who are responsible for that, also enough thought goes into look and feel of sfotware along with core functionality of software. I remember reading Linus statement somewhere where he said companies like RedHat did what i never wanted to do like documentation, proper intuitive GUI interfacing of software and i think that clearly conveys the point.
Posted Feb 28, 2004 23:39 UTC (Sat)
by vblum (guest, #1151)
[Link]
However, it cannot be said that (at least) CUPS has done a "shitty" job with their documentation. They just do not place it where a Windows/GUI type user would search. The CUPS-related man pages are pretty clear, if you _really_ want to get to the bottom of a problem. So, the problem here is not really about documentation. It is about not having powerful/intuitive enough tools to drive a complex, well-working, and in itself well-documented engine. This is like having a fast car, but the steering wheel in the back seat, the brake is a pedal outside the driver's door, and you have to crawl into the engine to shift gears. The documentation can be as good as it likes, it would be best if I did not have to read it in order to shift gears.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 7:13 UTC (Fri)
by arclynx (guest, #19834)
[Link] (6 responses)
Its like blaming your Sendmail, qmail or Postfix server when you want to setup your email account, where the frontend client is crappy and not user friendly. Also, most of the time, distribution tweak the program to suit their environment but not updating the documentation that comes with the program to reflect the tweaks that they have done. CUPS should not be blamed if Fedora turns off printer discovery by default to suit their security policy. Fedora should state that in the documentation that they turn off the feature, and provide the instruction on how to turn it back on.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 8:16 UTC (Fri)
by nogin (guest, #19836)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 14:49 UTC (Fri)
by piman (guest, #8957)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 9:20 UTC (Fri)
by hingo (guest, #14792)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 10:20 UTC (Fri)
by jhellan (guest, #17103)
[Link] (1 responses)
But a setup with one Windows machine and one Linux machine isn't exotic at all.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 13:20 UTC (Fri)
by hingo (guest, #14792)
[Link]
Posted Feb 28, 2004 5:32 UTC (Sat)
by piman (guest, #8957)
[Link]
This hasn't been the case for many months now. Please don't spread anti-Lindows FUD.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 9:22 UTC (Fri)
by metacircles (guest, #8895)
[Link] (2 responses)
I actually found it easier to configure by hand with .fetchmailrc, and that's despite the "local user floyd here is not there eieio adTHANKSvance" noiseword-enhanced syntax that serves mostly to obscure what it's actually doing.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:11 UTC (Fri)
by hathawsh (guest, #11289)
[Link]
Posted Mar 1, 2004 15:38 UTC (Mon)
by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 9:33 UTC (Fri)
by kundor (guest, #14621)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 10:08 UTC (Fri)
by dank (guest, #1865)
[Link]
CUPS may be powerful, but the documentation and interfaces are None of this is says that CUPS is irretrievably bad. Don't blame ESR for delivering unwelcome news; take his criticisms
Posted Feb 27, 2004 12:37 UTC (Fri)
by mwh (guest, #582)
[Link] (1 responses)
I think the various rants and counter rants are slightly missing the point. Configuration is always a major pain in the ass. It's been a long time since I've used it, but I don't recall setting up Windows networking being something you do for fun. The goal is to not have to do configuration. Get an iBook. Select "Automatic" from the location menu. Plug the ethernet cable in. Access the 'net. That's user friendly. The crime is writing software that has to be configured before it's usable. Unfortunately, printing is a hard area to make it go away in. Rendevous?
Posted Feb 27, 2004 21:02 UTC (Fri)
by mmarq (guest, #2332)
[Link]
Right... thats the common user point of view. But it can also be the opposite to the best solution to a programming problem point of view... and the principal concern of the Open Source developer paradigma is the technical solution for the problem, not ist interface... Example: 2)... find a spooler and driver interface mechanism that could 3)... find several interfaces for different raster engines, 4)... created the user interface that users could use to install
Posted Feb 27, 2004 13:07 UTC (Fri)
by jdinardo (guest, #18775)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 13:42 UTC (Fri)
by simonaf (guest, #19842)
[Link] (2 responses)
My point is this, though. As a relatively non-tech user, can I, and others like me, not help out in a non-tech user way with this kind of problem? I've looked at Bugzilla pages and been frightened off! But what about some kind of non-tech AuntTillieZilla? I would just love to put my four years of Linux struggles, trials and errors (and joys when "it works!") to good use for the community and I'm sure there must be others out there like me.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 15:10 UTC (Fri)
by ccyoung (guest, #16340)
[Link]
Suggestion: Each gui should have an <a href='easyform.apphome.com?form=select_queue'>user comments</a> at the bottom each form - this would be an invaluable feedback.
Posted Feb 28, 2004 20:25 UTC (Sat)
by rhkramer (guest, #15212)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 15:30 UTC (Fri)
by stock (guest, #5849)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:44 UTC (Fri)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link]
Posted Feb 27, 2004 17:32 UTC (Fri)
by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
[Link]
Busy user has new Linux system. Has just typed document. Realizes no printer is set up. Would like to print his/her document to existing printer nearby on network. Looks round for printer setup GUI interface. Finds one almost immediately. Attempts to use, ends up in cactus as described in ESR article. Of course they could RTFM. Getting the problem sorted via this route can easily take hours, even for users with technical nous. Has it occurred to you that 95+% of users, even Linux experts, might have better things to do with their time? Calling busy users ignorant lazy morons is ignorant and moronic.
Posted Feb 27, 2004 15:55 UTC (Fri)
by CardassianScot (guest, #19848)
[Link] (2 responses)
Of course sometimes there is an error and things go wrong and you can't see a network printer but a simple reboot clears them up. This is simple easy to use and what a windows user can cope with. (Of course being Linux I'm sure that a reboot is strictly speaking not neccessary, but the fact is that it works and for non-Gurus this is fine and what they expect).
Posted Feb 27, 2004 17:38 UTC (Fri)
by deatrich (guest, #25)
[Link] (1 responses)
I always kind of liked the old printtool, and wish the new one would
work as well. In time it probably will, but it doesn't yet. Because if this people use a mix of tools on Fedora/RedHat (printtool, command-line, hand-editting files and the web interface) to get printing going, at least when setting up server/client systems. Mixing these tools isn't a good thing, but seems to be necessary while printtool is so immature.
Posted Feb 28, 2004 4:36 UTC (Sat)
by stock (guest, #5849)
[Link]
Posted Feb 28, 2004 4:05 UTC (Sat)
by neoprene (guest, #8520)
[Link]
I insist on using USB stuff which get auto-recognized except for printers and scanners [and whatever else]. As the USB stuff gets auto-recognized the drivers don't get configured and loaded, why the hell not? Do I want to use the "Epson Stylus CX5200 Foomatic/gimp-print-ijs" or some of the other printer drivers? Why not load one automagically ande give an option to change it? Does it have to be this frikken difficult? Some GUI's are good but are no help because they don't provide any guidance, including the RedHat "printtool". KDEprint [printing manager] is a little better but it has pitfalls. [WTF is "class" of printer and "pseudo printer" ? Do I really need to know this?] Some GUI's can be helpful with their "wizards". I can think of "Firestarter" and "DVD::RIP" as being guiding and helpful. "Printtool" is of little help. And lets not get started on editing screen-rez and refresh-rates. [don't look for a GUI-slider]. Most things on in the PC world gets done w/o poring over half-cooked "readme's" and "man" pages without concrete examples and 59 command switches. Unless average Joe 6pack can use a program what good is it?
Posted Feb 29, 2004 2:28 UTC (Sun)
by lvteacher (guest, #14548)
[Link]
I hate to disagree with Mr. raymond, but Windows is definitely not easier. lvteacher
Posted Feb 29, 2004 18:37 UTC (Sun)
by ice (guest, #19875)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 29, 2004 21:19 UTC (Sun)
by dve (guest, #15903)
[Link]
At least CUPS provides a straightforward interface that leaves you in no doubt as to what is wrong, when it goes wrong (ESR and I must not be using the same thing) _assuming_ you understand printers and what ails them. ESR? My only real objection is a fundamental premise of your article: You have assumed that Aunt Tillie knows far more than most computer users do. I'm not sure who _your_ Aunt Tillie is ('Aunt Tillie could handle this just fine.') but I can line up a dozen users from our corporation who have been using computers, and indeed printers, every work-day, all-day for more than eight years who still do not know the difference between a monitor and a mouse, or a laser-printer and a dot-matrix. Many more are still not quite aware that things have to be plugged into other things (power, networks, serial and printer ports) in order to work at all, let alone communicate with other devices. The most IT-savvy person at my company (aside from myself) plugged an ethernet cable into a PHONE socket, KNOWING that it was a phone-socket, and expected it to work, and was confused when it did not. And that's about normal. I've worked for a lot of SME's over the years, and there's nothing unusual about that. Remember, most of our Aunt Tillies don't even _have_ a computer, because they find Apple and Microsoft products far too confusing to set up or use.
Posted Mar 1, 2004 13:39 UTC (Mon)
by hppnq (guest, #14462)
[Link]
I think you misread Eric's rant.
Indeed, when using a wizard I expect it help me through some
less exotic installation options. Having to use a wizard that does not
live up to the most basic expectations (i.e., it will simplify some common
task for me), is much, much worse than having no wizard at all.
If your software is so complicated it can't be
configured with a few mouse-clicks, aunt Tilly probably doesn't need it and
doesn't want to know about it, so everybody will be very happy if you just
leave it at a simple README: "This software is not for the faint of heart,
you really have to know about DNS to be able to do anything useful with
it." Some software is intrinsically complicated, and it is okay to ask of users that they invest some time in trying to figure out how to configure and use it. Fine.
If you however distribute a shiny wizard that advertises to be a "DNS configuration wizard" it'd better know about zone transfers and reverse lookups. And know it damn well.
At least it should be able to see that things are not working out the way it planned, and it should tell me, "look, I really cannot help you out here, I'm just a simple wizard, please consult <insert other source
of information> for more help".
Frankly, I would have expected some simple administration tasks and
problems to have been addressed and dealt with by now, by most
distributions (which I think have lot of responsibility on the usability
front, if only for including software packages that I suppose comply with certain
standards). I can't believe that printing and other such mundane tasks are
still a pain in the OSS. This is not quantum gravity, this is getting the
bloody printer working.
Posted Mar 2, 2004 2:37 UTC (Tue)
by melauer (guest, #2438)
[Link]
Posted Mar 7, 2004 16:13 UTC (Sun)
by nkoozer (guest, #5553)
[Link]
I wholeheartedly agree with this. And CUPS is definitely not the only place this happens. And it is exactly the reason I have not recommended Linux to any other users besides my techie friends and co-workers.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Likewise. ESR's key point:
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
2. Is there any screen in my GUI that is a dead end, without giving guidance further into the system?
3. The requirement that end-users read documentation is a sign of UI design failure. Is my UI design a failure?
4. For technical tasks that do require documentation, do they fail to mention critical defaults?
5. And, most importantly of all...do I allow my users the precious luxury of ignorance?
6. Does your project welcome and respond to usability feedback from non-expert users?
One thing to note is that CUPS is produced by a company which also produces a proprietary product (ESP Print Pro) that (in a way) competes with CUPS. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the issues that Eric experienced are mysteriously solved with the proprietary version. (I'm not saying that they are solved, I'm just tinfoiling...)
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
"...CUPS is produced by a company which also produces a proprietary product (ESP Print Pro).."The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
LinuxPrinting.org? We're certainly not at all proprietary here, at The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
least if I understand your intended meaning properly...
metadata. CUPS only works pleasingly for printers which can be described
accurately as PostScript printers in a PPD file. For non-PostScript
printers, this can be a bit of a trick.
used by more or less every distribution. Among other things, there is
a PPD file generator, and a glue script to plug drivers into CUPS (these
two things are the most popular facet of Foomatic, whose exceptionally
nonobvious name I won't go into now ;).
services: a smattering of documents, forums, a support database, etc.
The docs are a disaster, and the forums hit or miss, but the database
is quite popular.
Just an idea...The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
That would make another subsystem very close to a true split driver paradigma, as the USB subsystem and as ALSA, we could say... and IMHO a gain to print server implementations...
" And it is exactly the reason I have not recommended Linux to any other users besides my techie friends and co-workers."The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
you could easly offer half of the price of a windows system in a contract for maintenance, installation and configuration, because a linux system stays out of trouble for far more than the double the time of a windows system...
propaganda brainwashed" users that really think that everything is just point and click... as easy and cheap to get as a radio or TV set or a 1Kg of beef, because theirs PC are bought in the same store as those items...
So technician work for a "common window loser" is a wortless kid job...until they have to pay triple because there is no way in recovering from bugs, virus or crazy deletes... that is when i most recommend Linux to even the clueless of "six packers".
Just so you know...Your post is SO misspelled, that I stopped reading it partway through. I just couldn't get through it. The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Sorry about my english
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Just so you know...Your post is SO full of prejudice, that I stopped reading it partway through. I just couldn't get through it.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
thanks for pointing this out. I think that (americans especially) folks can be so damn ethnocentric that they forget the fact that most people do NOT in fact speak their language (usually english speakers here). In fact, these folk should be *thanking* the poor speller for 'stooping' to using english because the english speaker knows only the one language. Those monolingual english speakers need to remember that the web is a global community and some very nice multilinguals out there are being very considerate in posting messages in english instead of their native language.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
The poster is more than likely well aware that there are people who post here whose native language is not English. His point, as I read it, was that mmarq should probably take a little more time when posting to make sure his points come across clearly. It would seem to me that it is the poster's responsibility to express himself clearly; if he is not a native speaker, the extra time needed could be seen as an opportunity for self-improvement. I know that if I were posting somewhere that was mainly non-English, I would try very hard to write correctly in the target language, to avoid this very issue.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Hmmmmmm, excellent point, although I don't think everyone woud be able to accept it. The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Some people are pretty stubborn you know.
Here's an idea, why don't you re-write your post in, say French, just to show
everybody how easy it is. Post it here so some native French speakers can comment
on what a great job you did. Also I think you should mention how long it took you as
well, just to show it doesn't take long.
I feel this will educate all those non-english speakers, or maybe you and the other
bigots. Who knows?
There are people whose native languages aren't English. But spelling is the easiest thing for a computer to automatically check. And that post showed a few of the common errors of a non-native speaker, but had overlong sentences, and a overuse of ellipses, a sign of bad writing independent on knowing the language.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Well...The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Why is it that americans persist in thinking that the rigth thing to do to someone who has learned their language quite well and is using it to communicate in an international setting is to critisize because the person has not learnt it to perfection ?The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I also found this article ringing with clear truth. I enjoyed it, The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
laughed and had a good time. However;
various flavors, most recently Mandrake KDE, running CUPS, because
despite the woes of getting the machine to behave, once it's
up and running, it's off and gone down the track, and I *NEVER*
hear from my folks about problems. It just works.
through over the years.
machines just work.
To quote myself in a posting to Userlinux mailing listThe Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
User Interface Target Matrix
You can split the tasks on the desktop/system into four major roles.
The Four Major Roles
User : Desktop as tools and occasional barriers to getting things done
Admin : Providing support and maintaining the system
Builder: Collects, selects, bundles, customizes and installs/deploys.
Developer: Creates/Hacks software.
It is also possible to classify the approach people take in performing
each of the four roles.
The Four Classes of approach.
Casual : Intermittent, Beginning, or busy/lazy users.
Everyday : General days to day users
Power : Customize and Automate
Guru : In depth knowledge and command line shortcuts
It is obvious that some people perform more than one role and can
approach each role as a differing class of approach, based upon their
knowledge and desire. It is also obvious that each has different
requirements and that attempting to force any user interface which
does not match that person's approach is going to irritate them and
become a barrier to adoption and use.
While it is possible to upskill, if its not a direct requirement of
their employment, most people consider it a hassle not worth the effort.
Microsoft's approach has been to further dumb down the builder,admin and
developer user interfaces, which irritates many everyday, power and guru
users.
A truly successful Linux/Open Source/Free desktop environment would
continue to provide multiple *synchronized* user interfaces for each of
the four roles targeting each individual approach.
Or rather than run screaming, they could just use lprng. This in the end is the real strength of an open system (competition that is).
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Fortunately, the problem has nothing to do with CUPS but simply ESR's lack of familiarity with the tools (and their lack of clear consice documentation), so resorting to using LPRng isn't necessary. Just cleaning up and documenting system-config-printer (as it's called in Fedora now)
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
ESR is complaining^Wranting about two orthogonal things: a Fedora/RH-thingy, which doesn't actually have much to do with CUPS, and lack of hand-holding for people not familiar with IPP. AFAICS, he kept thinking inside the box of the things he's familiar with (LPR) and therefore he hit a bump in the road. After having installed some moderately complex print servers using CUPS, the best advice IMO is "forget what you know, _READ_ the documentation _before_ you start doing anything and draw a plan of what you want to do".The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
> what's the difference betwen Joe User ranting because he doesn't read docs and ESR ranting because he doesn't read docs?The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Just because Mr. Raymond claims to be a luminary and the spokesman for everyone that uses Linux doesn't mean he's omniscient. When working with something new, everyone will go back to their basic assumptions based on what they've worked with before. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. CUPS is a fairly complicated piece of software, and the user interface and documentation does need improvement. However, I don't think this story deserves a headline on LWN just because it's Eric ranting about something again.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Nobody can be expected to be familiar with tools you only should use once. It's not like he'll be installing his printer five times a day, every day.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Not really.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Yes, but how many computers come with Debian (or even RedHat) pre-installed? It's a Catch-22. Nobody is going to pre-install Linux until enough customers demand it, and customers won't ask for Linux because "everyone knows" Linux is too hard for Joe Sixpack.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
> Because "regular" end users should not have to install an operating system.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
> Because "regular" end users should not have to install an operating system.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I agree whole heartedly. As a Linux newbie (who has been reading LWN for about 6 months.) I spent 5-6 hours this week figuring out how to add an application (eclipse) to the KDE menu AND GET IT RUNNING! All the documentation I found just kept repeating how to get it on the menu -- nothing anywhere about different ways to actually get it to run, what parameters to pass where, etc.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
>If I were to contribute to Linux... It would be on a documentation project.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Editing config files was unnecessary. The description of lack of discoverability of how to set up remote printers is a design issue with redhat-config-printer and not of CUPS. The solution is to open redhat-config-printer on the machine to which the printer is physically connected, highlight the desired printer, open the Action menu, press sharing, and check "This queue is available to other computers." It's a relatively simple task, but the option is not very visible. All that wasted time would probably have been spared had there been a "Sharing" button on the toolbar.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Yeah, SuSe's YAST setup and Mandrake's DrakX does not have those problems. So I have to wonder why my hero Eric is picking on CUPS as though redhat-config-printer was their fault. Maybe he wasn't paying attention? Shooting his gun maybe? ERIC: DO NOT SHOOT YOUR GUN AND SET UP CUPS AT THE SAME TIME!!!
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I want to tell that the experience with windows is not better. I spent half a day properly configuring IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) on a windows server accessed from a windows client. And even now I don't feel completly satisfied (but how to be satisfied of something based on IIS?).The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Note however that I'm not dumb to have spent that much time with my configuration, but I had some special requirements about authentication and security that were not easily met (if met at all).
That's hardly the same as getting low security basic networked printing working on a desktop.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I completely understand his frustration but he's a bit abusive. I'd alsoHmm
like to point out that the broadcasting feature being turned off and the
listening address being set to localhost by default may not be the fault
of the CUPS developers but the "fault" of the distribution.
annoying on a large network and is one of the reasons I don't like
Windows. Couldn't CUPS use multicast or maybe listen for a broadcast
request and only respond if they haven't received one in the last N
seconds? That way there is no traffic for uninterested computers or no
traffic when nobody is doing autoconfiguration.
I don't think that he is being abusive at all. The piece reflects the very real frustration that users feel when confronted with UI and doco that are broken. Not so abusive
He calls the CUPS developers idiots and has nothing nice to say aboutReally?
them (other than he likes the design of the network-based autodiscovery).
been reconfigured by the distributor without changing the documentation.
>He calls the CUPS developers idiots and has nothing nice to say about Really?
them
Oooooh, the typical luserish behavior of 'I only listen to your
complaints if you give me a pet on the back'. That's almost comparable to
chantage.
Do you also start with positive, constructive comments if somebody knocks
your teeth out?
Eric would have grounds to criticize the CUPS developers' technical abilities, had he implemented (or substantially designed) a printing system himself, or a GUI interface to CUPS.Really?
I'm not sure if you are just trolling, but assuming not there areReally?
several differences you seem to have missed.
horrible act of giving him a free (in both senses) printing system
based on current Internet standards. If that's such a horrible
crime I wouldn't like to see what you'd call the kernel developers.
will listen to his rant or not. And either way my point, which was
that the rant was not very constructive, stands.
you avoid pushing the other side to dig in their heels.
the stupid GUI he spends the most words ripping on.
willing to clean up his own.
report with plenty of documentation, or, horror of horrors, a patch.
You know, that whole open source collaboration thing?
1) So, if it is free, you have no right to complain about it? Really?
2) If you look at the first five reactions, at the top of this page, I
see some very good comments where UI designers can take advantage of.
Apart from that, his whole describtion of what things went wrong, and
what he did next, is certainly useful for UI designers.
3) yes, being polite does get you better results. However, if the other
party refuses to listen to valid complaints because they're 'not worded
properly' then it becomes a wordgame. You might expect such behavior big
bureaucratic companies, not from open source developers.
4) Ah, he's barking up the wrong tree, so we can ignore him.
5) And before we take his complaint serious, let him fix his own work.
That will teach him.
6) Yeah, raising the bar for complaints is also a good idea.
I'll bet that if you combine the above three points, most users will just
cave in, and pray that the next version has fixed their bugs
automagically. Ever googled for the 'clue train manifesto?'
That whole open source collaboration thing thrives on listening to your
users, and taking them serious.
1) Did I say that? I don't think so. What I said was that releasingReally?
something free is not the same as kicking your users in the mouth. Sure
they can complain. I can complain about your post using invalid debate
tactics can't I. But if I said you're an idiot for the way you designed
the CUPS GUI you would probably not take me seriously. And if I failed to
understand why and said "just because your post was free doesn't mean I
don't have a right to complain about it" you should have the right to
laugh in my face.
ESR's rant, not posts on LWN.
shouldn't listen to complaints? I don't think so. What I am saying is
that it is a natural human tendency to react badly to people who call you
names -- especially when they ignore feedback channels and use their
notoriety to call you names in a public rant.
5) I didn't say we should ignore his complaint because of this but he
probably should check his own work for the flaws he's complaining about
before lobbing such a rant to the public.
crappy way to approach fixing the problem if he really wanted to get it
fixed. I didn't say that user's complaints should be ignored if they are
not "properly worded" or fail to "meet the bar". But if someone like ESR
can't be bothered to complain in a productive way there is little hope for
decent user feedback in general. And it makes me wonder if he really
should be one of our "leaders".
I believe the example configuration file that comes with the CUPS source has these faults as well.
Hmm
Then nevermind what I said above. That's a pretty confusing disconnectAh, ok
between documentation and implementation.
Apparently he was complaining about a GUI that wasn't even written byI retract my retraction
the CUPS people. It's hard to criticize them for not being consistent
when they only control one part of the software. ESR should have called
the Red Hat or Fedora people idiots instead.
I think it worth consideration that if CUPS /did/ share printers by default, it'd be a significant security issue.non-shared default "fault"
It would definitely be a security issue if printers were shared by non-shared default "fault"
default. But it doesn't help much if users don't realize that their
printers aren't shared by default, and why. If sharing your printer is a
security concern, then there needs to be guidance as to how to maintain
configuration with acceptable security while getting what you want to
work.
I've been using Linux for awhile. I've found configuring printers is a monstrosity. I've still never been able to get printing working as well as it should. Even with a fairly common Epson 740, printing is hit and miss. Some things kind of work, many things don't work at all.Printing a Linux Nightmare
You know, I've configured printers under VMS, SunOS, Solaris, Irix, HPUX, and even Windows. My experience boils down to this: printers are a pain. Some systems make setting up printers harder than others (early Solaris releases had a truly unbelievable print system; don't know if they've improved it since or not), but it remains an obnoxious task. CUPS is actually better than many of the alternatives.
Printing a Linux Nightmare
Configure printers under SUSE, and the pains are gone. However, that is using YAST, not CUPS-shipped tools. Not free software, but will make Aunt Tillie happy enough.Printing a Linux Nightmare
One more: I think Eric's criticism is badly aimed. Printing a Linux Nightmare
(b) 15 different tools for the same task, each with its own unique bugs
(c) disconnect between the (possibly deficient) distro's tool and the actually capable projects setup tools.
Printing a Linux Nightmare
I don't understand some of my friends. Many of them use Fedora/Redhat/etc
and I hear stories like this about Samba, CUPS, etc..Yet they swear they
will never use SUSE because of some horror story they've had.
I've maintained 50 SUSE desktops (8.2 and 9.0 currently) and 2 SUSE
servers for about 4 years now. My experience with printing: lpr was a
nightmare, lprng was somewhat better, but when SUSE's implementation of
CUPS arrived, it was like a breath of fresh air. Everything worked.
Printing queues are set on the server,the clients just listen to the
server, so no reconfig for them when modifying/adding a printer. Of
course, I don't know maybe SUSE added some magic (YAST) that makes CUPS
work (it was even able to read the manufacturer's printer pdd file off
the CD-ROM), but it works and it works well.
BTW, we use KDEprint all the time (even in non-KDE apps), but I never was
confronted with a CUPS password or needed one, although I did have to add
cupsd:localhost to the hosts.allow file at one point.
Nobody says I have to use SUSE, nobody says I have to use Samba, nobody
says I have to use CUPS. I have other things to do with my life, I don't
want to constantly tinker with my systems.
I find the consistency of KDE so appealing that I use konqueror more than
99% of the time, maybe mozilla the other 1%. I understand ESR's
frustration; but, surely, having built his own masterpieces, he can
appreciate the value of software like Samba and CUPS.
Yes, perhaps the UI for CUPS is not ready for Aunt Tillie, but it sure is
usable by me, and hence by the 300-odd people who rely on my systems.
In case this needs to be said: Thank you CUPS for an outstanding piece of
work.
SUSE 9.0 . If a user wishes to change the printer status from an incorrect "offline" to ready, that can be done using right-click on the printer in kdeprint. However, the action has no effect unless the user enters a valid cups password - which, by default, is different than the user's password. cups password
SUSE YAST will make aunt Tillie happy? Ha! Printing a Linux Nightmare
Ever tried running a windows print server? It doesn't always "just work" I assure you. Fun with crap drivers, jobs that just don't want to cancel no matter what, etc. I do agree that it's _much_ easier to configure than under Linux, though more advanced configuration can be harder. Oh - and next time you set up a printer for A4 printing under Windows, count the number of different places you need to change "Letter" to "A4". With the last printer I set up, it was _eight_. *grinds teeth*.Windows printing easy
Heh, you're annoyed by always having to switch from Letter to A4. I'm Windows printing easy
annoyed because some apps seem to insist on always going back to A4 after
I've told them to use Letter.
And A4 is as nonstandard over here as Letter is over there. :-)
I grieve with you for your experiences, but other than that, I apologize, and you do not Printing a Linux Nightmare
reflect my experiences here. I
was talking about a network printer only environment. YaST worked flawlessly, one queue
per printer. kprint manages the different settings for individual print jobs just fine.
This is not an advertisement, I realize there are many flaws and quirks left in almost every
user interface. But your topic was YaST, and have you really tried to use it together with
kdeprint as a client in a network?
Not (yet) on SUSE9, though I will try exactly that in the next few (I Printing a Linux Nightmare
hope) minutes. We've tried all sorts of combinations of SUSE 7 and 8,
CUPS and Samba, Windows 98 and 2K in my office, and it never happenned
that everyone could print (or that anyone in particular could print for a
very long period).
It was been such a hassle that the administrator (admittedly not a
super-expert, but not Aunt Tillie either) gave up, hung the printer from
a seldom used Windows machine, and let it stay like that. I seldom have
to print, but when I do it is OpenOffice docs or OrCAD designs (which are
natively Win, anyway) , so I move into Windows and print, then go back to
Linux. If desperate, I plug the printer in my machine: that works fine.
As for SusE, I don't think they've done the best job with print admin,
with two different entries in KDE's Control Center --
Modules->Hardware->Printer and Peripherals->Printers -- as well as
entries in the main menu in System->Monitor->PrintJobs and
Utilities->Print->PrinterAdministration, which do largely the same.
Before you dispair, there's also text-mode yast, CUPS http admin, and
last but not least, manual editing of /etc/xxxx with much praying and
cursing. And surely, there must be some equivalent options in Gnome which
I dare not explore.
All these means to one end, and none good!
> Overall, I think that printing on every OS I've ever worked with has
> been totally crap, and I regularly wish I could simply get rid of the
> damnn printers entirely
HAHAHA! I agree ... "I've got a dream ...!"
Curious to hear whether SUSE9 does better. Printing a Linux Nightmare
Printing a Linux Nightmare
If you have trouble, email me - suse.linux(at)temple.edu
Just a note from another Debian (unstable) user (somewhat stable): I was very Printing (for me) a Linux Dream
pleasantly surprised when trying to get printing working that the combination of
CUPS and KDE made the effort painless.
Rather than try to remember everything I have done, check this out:
http://mumford1.dyndns.org/~bs7452/linuxhelp/cups.html
It seems to be a good resource, and does not rely on your using KDE, which my
instructions would. I used the kaddprinterwizard to add my printer -- I think it
performs the CUPS config. At no point did I need to edit CUPS config files directly.
Instructions for the additional setup of Samba to share the CUPS printers can be
found here:
http://cups.org/sam.html#8_8
If you want to chat about it, drop me a line at printer-setup (at) oolong (dot) com.
HTH,
au79
To be honest I'm on Debian, which doesn't directly come with printer tools. But I've already installed no end of foomatics and "gui helpers". Printing a Linux Nightmare
[...]
For the love of all things, a simple HOWTO would be welcome, but nothing was available when I was searching a year or so ago.
</shameless plug>
Sorry, but i have to disagree a bit. The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
my experience with cups was more like this:
server runs cups. has a laserjet 2100m and a deskjet 895Cxi, both work
fine.
So I connect, say, my laptop running suse 9.0 via wlan. I did not
configure anything at all concerning printers... but when I try to print
from within any KDE app, I get a nice shiny print dialogue (kprinter)
showing me (besides some other options) my laserjet and my deskjet.
also, from a shell, typing lpq results in "queue DeskJet is empty".
so much for cups. or suse vs. fedora ;)
I agree that the CUPS system should be easier for a casual user to configure, on *all* distributions of Linux.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I attempted to setup CUPS on my network a few months ago and ran into similar problems. I ended up going back to lpd becouse I couldn't imagine any 'features' of this 'new, simpler' system that could possibly be worth the hassle of getting it setup.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Why knock ancient Sanskrit?The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
:)
He must have felt it inferior to Modern Sanskrit.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I've been using Linux for about 2 years now. I work mostly in a windows world becasue that is what pays the bills. However, I had no problem using Mandrake 9.0 to host several HP laserjet printers in a mostly windows environment. Amazing how usful MAN is.
It wasn't that hard for me
"Amazing how usful MAN is."It wasn't that hard for me
Aunt Tillie ain't gonna even get a xterm open, or know to use 'man', let alone figure out what man page to look at!
Eric's point is that it should be a 'point and click' job to set up a printer (and most everything else) if Linux is going to be king of the desktop.
I've used Kups, Mandrake's printerdrake, Redhat's redhat-config-printer,
'vi /etc/cupsd.conf', cups' web interface, etc., etc.. and mostly, I can get it to work... sometimes removing and reinstalling cups... but, I ain't no Aunt Tillie! Like Jon Corbet, I've configured printers under VMS, Solaris, Irix, Linux, WindowsXX, ULTRIX and a few others that my old brain has forgotten,,, and printin' ain't easy.... but, it should be! Especially, if we want to take over the world.
Eh. This particular hair-pulling instance seems to be the same old problem of The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
twenty wrappers over a core text-based config interface. The web interface,
Kprinter, printtool, gnome's thing, and all the others each have different
inconsistencies, bugs, incompletenesses, etc.
The more subtle problem with printing is that printing, more so that other
ostensibly similar subsystems, involves the integration of several different
software packages. To add insult to injury, CUPS does so over one of the
more complex RFC-defined protocols around. (The IPP specs are true
*monsters*).
Furthermore, integration work is fiddley and hard, and is something that
individual free software authors suck at. Linux distributors make some effort,
but typically they assign a fraction of an engineer to the task, and produce
some distribution-proprietary ugly thing (like printtool/printerconf).
Finally, the state of printing documentation is rather poor. The Printing
HOWTO is totally obsolete. Alternative CUPS documentation is generally
verbose and poorly organized, or just verbose to the point of being useless.
Practically every other spooler has better documentation (not to suggest
that many have *good* documentation, but most are better, certainly).
I'm just glad he didn't have a *driver* snafu. The pain involved in diagnosing
driver issues is mind numbing in comparison to the minor aches one gets from
these sorts of plumbing problems.
Grant Taylor - author, Printing HOWTO and founder, linuxprinting.org.
" To add insult to injury, CUPS does so over one of theThe Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
more complex RFC-defined protocols around. (The IPP specs are true
*monsters*). "
I setup CUPS on Fedora, no problem. All my Linux systems could print just fine. However, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get my wife's work laptop (Win2K) to print to CUPS; it kept saying that the printer was not available. A few minutes of Googling found the answer (needed to define a class, not just a printer). After that, everything works. Day-to-day use of CUPS is much easier than lprng, but the setup was confusing for a Windows machine.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I've just had to do the same thing at home - I found the same webpage you did, followed it, and found the classes bit it was completely unnecessary.CUPS, IPP and Windows
I agree with ESR's verdict. I have never found CUPS anythingESR is right
remotely like easy. Figuring out how to set the default printer
without the GUI from the documentation was a nightmare.
the user's default is set in ~/.lpoptions, and the system default is set in /etc/cups/lpoptions;
the handy command "lpoptions -d printername" will *overwrite* one of
those files with new contents that set the specified default printer.
It decides which one to write based on whether you are root.
So if you need to tell people how to change their default
printer, they have to know to look at both those files
and possibly run that command twice or remove ~/.lpoptions.
it overwrites all the old options?), but it sure was hell to figure out.
ESR's experience is quite reminiscent of my own experiences with CUPS. Ignorance and Power
(Repeated every so often just to see if anything has improved, since CUPS
does have a lot of power.) It lures you in with friendly-looking
interfaces, but those interfaces are useless if anything goes wrong. And
with printers on a network, something always goes wrong. So then you
need to back up and go at things the unfriendly way in order to get it
working. That means that the experience gained in the initial attempt is
wasted, and you need to start over at the bottom of a different (steeper)
learning curve.
If CUPS had just said up front, "sorry, you need to deal with command
lines and /etc files in order to make this work reliably," it would be
much less frustrating. Which is why I find myself much less frustrated
by LPRng, which has no friendly-looking interfaces. At least with LPRng,
I know going in that I need to have some understanding of print
protocols, /etc/printcap, and input filters, and my experience
configuring the basic stuff prepares me for troubleshooting.
When the nearly-useless front-ends are removed, I find the underlying
command lines and /etc files in CUPS much less friendly than the
equivalents in LPRng. I do have experience with both the BSD print
system that LPRng is patterned on and the System V print system that CUPS
is patterned on, and found similar issues in those older systems.
I don't know when ESR last used some of Windoze command line tools, or some of the less used GUI tools - they aren't much better than his experience with CUPS. But that's besides the point.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
If you think CUPS is hard to set up, try customising Xprint.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
A lot of people have said, "I use CUPS, it works great!" These people use CUPS to print small files to a local printer. They certainly don't use CUPS in a heavy-duty networked environment.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
You may think that people only print small files to local computers, but posting that remark check your assumptions
unchecked is a bit derogatory. I use CUPS under SUSE in a heavily networked environment.
There is no local printer attached to the computer. It works.
requires editing /etc/cups/whatever, to make the printer work again. As stated before: the
kde print manager does away with that hand editing ... provided CUPS knows that you're
allowed to edit that (silly password requirement).
Aah, yes - my good friends 'client-error-not-found' and 'client-error-forbidden'.I share your pain
When you get down to it what is really going on is to have a common installThe Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
program that all can use.Even if it means answering a couple of prompts. I have been using linux for a couple of years, am not a programer, but always think of myself as a newbie. I feel that the only thing that is holding linux back from going mainstream is a common install program. If a newbie has a good experience with linux, it will spread like wildfire, and we would not have to sell anyone about linux, because I know it would sell itself. I'm not a programer, or a hacker.I'm just one of many of those users out there who sees linux as a great operating system, but usually has trouble convincing someone else who has had a bad experience installing something on linux to give it another try, after they went back to windows. A majority of the programs for linux that are out there are fantastic, but a lot of people that are newbies become overwelmed with the install. Linux needs a great install program if we want to get on the desktop. I know that a lot of the companies out there have a lot of experienced people doing the installs but think of the average CEO of a company who hears a lot about linux, so he decides to load it on his own home computer to see what all the hype is about. He loads the operating system with no problem, sees a program that sounds very interesting, and sounds like something that his company could really use, but ends up giving up because the install isn't as easy as what he is use to. So what does he think about linux? Linux is a great operating system but not ready for his company yet. When someone else comes to him with the idea that we should use linux in the company, he still remembers his own experience with linux and tells the person, maybe some other time. As a person who thinks linux is great and a CEO who is sketical, it would have been much easier to sell him on linux, had he had a good experience from the getgo.
When it comes to documentation and making things more intuitive, you just cant blame the FLOSS developers, Thats where money comes into picture!!!!
I know ESR's point is about Aunt Tillie and usability, and his test case clearly shows that that failed, for his setup.Not so fast ...
ESR is bashing the wrong people. The tools that he use is the redhat-config-printer, developed and maintained by Red Hat and its Fedora Project. He should not directly channeled all the usability issue to the CUPS people, as CUPS should and could not control what frontend people will use to configure and connect to its servers. ESR should bash Red Hat.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
BTW, I have filed an RFE [redhat.com] in Red Hat's Bugzilla bug database [redhat.com] asking them to look up into some of the (IMHO valid) points that ESR have raised. Let's hope something actually comes out of it.
I reported this to Red Hat
This is, of course, what Eric himself should have done if he were a responsible "Open Source citizen". Ranting against developers is no way to get your bugs fixed (unless you happen to be well-known, in which case, apparently you don't need to follow good development guidelines).
I reported this to Red Hat
Agree. All of ESR's rant is based on a very narrow view of the world. Why would Aunt
Tillie be using Fedora in the first place? Red Hat certainly doesn't recommend her to! I
don't either. There are distributions out there where printing works. Suse has been
mentioned, Mandrake certainly is a good choice too. Personally I don't know how
distros like Xandros perform, but at least they claim to be user friendly, which Fedora
does not. (Don't recommend Lindows though, as long as they ship with everything
runs under root with empty password.) And one last thing, discussing whether CUPS
can or cannot do something on a 300 machine network is also completely irreleveant.
Aunt Tillie is not the admin of that network!
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
In addition to Fedora being the one true choice, there is the thing about Gnome. This is
Free Software, and you have the right to refuse from using KDE. But if you make such
a choice, it's not right to say that *all* Free GUI Software out there is crap. It's just that
you chose to use crap. (And yes there are good Gnome apps too, but now we are
discussing Kprinter vs crap.)
One thing mentioned in comments, is the problem with all distros shipping their own
config tools. Yes people, we have a serious NIH syndrome and this is one of it's
results. The problem is, how can we get RH to admit, that they could actually make
use of some of Mandrakes config tools? It's too much to ask, after all RH is the big
one, the one and only. For Mandrake it doesn't make sense to use RH tools, since
they are inferior (in many cases, mdk has problematic tools of their own as well). All in
all, don't expect this to go away soon, but with time it will go away. Like Linus says,
it's evolution. Let everyone give it a try, it's a mess at first, but the end result is
potentionally better than if you pick one solution early (Hurd, anyone?) and stubbornly
stick to it.
henrik
> And one last thing, discussing whether CUPS can or cannot do something onThe Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
> 300 machine network is also completely irreleveant. Aunt Tillie is not the
> admin of that network!
No, I was referreing to some of the comments in this thread. Sorry for the confusion. The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Erics only problem seems to be, that Fedora is not the distro for Aunt Tillie. The setting
for his problem is fully relevant.
> (Don't recommend Lindows though, as long as they ship with everything runs under root with empty password.)The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I wonder if Eric has ever evaluated the Tk fetchmailconf utility using the same criteria. "Configurator novice controls"? It's not even /English/The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I agree. To Eric: like CUPS, fetchmail is nice, but setting it up is hard. The GUI only makes it worse. I think the open source community as a whole would benefit from a project that fixes the configuration of fetchmail and documents every step along the way. Other projects could learn from the process. (I know I would!) As a side benefit, fetchmail would become easy enough for Aunt Tillie to use.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
I don't entirely agree about the GUI for fetchmail configuration being useless, as I was able to use this tool for a successful config first time I did this when I knew rather less about fetchmail, SMTP and POP3 than I do now. However, I did also find it easier to handcraft existing .fetchmailrc's by hand later when I had a slightly better idea about what was going on. This beats the Windoze philosophy where you don't have the ability to get your hands under the bonnet unless you are willing to risk rubbishing the whole system with regedit, not just the component you are working on.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Hmm. Using Mandrake's tools, I set up cups to print to either my local inkjet or the laserjet down the hill which serves half of the campus, with absolutely no effort whatsoever.Beauty of Mandrake
Since everything Mandrake does is GPL'd, I suggest cups just take Printdrake and make it their control gui ;)
It seems people will apologize for anything.Amazing that people are defending CUPS
godawful. This situation doesn't have to last long, though.
As with many packages, it has started out without much polish,
and is now hitting the real-world problems (surprising to its
developers and early adopters) that keep it from being truly ready
for adoption by the average person. All we need are more people like
ESR to raise the red flag, and more people to help polish away the
rough bits in the documentation and code.
As with the earlier poster, I keep trying it periodically
to see if it's improved to the point of being usable.
to heart, fix the problems, and help CUPS become more usable.
(I might if I wasn't busy scratching other itches, like
making gcc/glibc crosscompilers easy to configure and build,
or getting universities to adopt OpenOffice...)
Hey, I just posted this to Ars Technica's forum! Let's post it here too...The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
" Get an iBook. Select "Automatic" from the location menu. Plug the ethernet cable in. Access the 'net. That's user friendly "The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Problem: 1)...find a way to print over the internet, well integrated in
WAN areas, to the point that networked printers alone could
replace the old fax infrastructure.
Solution:- IPP was created
work with the new protocol
Solution:- CUPS and Fomatic were created
filters etc.
Solution:- Ghostscript was improved and others print tools were created.
and configure this superior printing mechanism.
Solution:- PrintDrake is getting excelent
So i could not see how could have been possible to start with nº 4) and get to a good nº 1.
Its obviously "insane" to even "sketch" define 4) if you dont have a clue of how 1) is going to be... at least is very obvious to me, and i'm not really a programmer , or at lest i dont consider myself one.
I have used cups under various distros and I have had problems . Now , I compile it myself, and it works perfectly for me (although I only have HP printers which are fully supported by cups).
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
As a non-developer (status - "interested fiddler"), far be it from me to make any comment about the quality of CUPS or any other software. However, I read the article with fascination, having been through a similar situation just last night. I have a dual-boot machine "main" (W2K + Suse 9.0) with local printer, another W2K machine "shuttle" and a third running Mandrake "sonata"(my new pet), all linked to a wireless router and cable modem. "Shuttle" prints fine (so long as "main" is in Windows) but I was unable to print from "sonata", suffering some of the same CUPS problems mentioned in the article.A Use for Luxurious Ignorance?
Good Point!_user_ feedback
I try to record my "learning experiences" on WikiLearn A Use for Luxurious Ignorance?
(http://cgi-bin/view/Wikilearn/AboutThesePages) and invite others to do
the same.
When there is useful information there, other users and developers can
make use of it.
Randy Kramer
ESR : You Ignorant Lazy Moron :)
Dear Eric,
in response to your rant on :
"The Luxury of Ignorance":
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
I only can come up with these thoughts of mind :
WTF?? CUPS ? How does that work? hmm RTFM? lessee :
man cupsd :
SEE ALSO
backend(1), classes.conf(5), cupsd.conf(5), filter(1), mime.convs(5),
mime.types(5), printers.conf(5), CUPS Implementation of IPP, CUPS
Interface Design Description, CUPS Software Administrators Manual,
http://localhost:631/documentation.html
Ohhh!!! lets open up my browser and load :
http://localhost:631/
Robert
Sorry, CUPS' web interface is useless when anything goes wrong.
ESR : You Ignorant Lazy Moron :)
You spectacularly miss the point, which is about usability or otherwise of GUI interfaces.Re: ESR : You Ignorant Lazy Moron :)
Just to echo the comments of others that this is a Fedora issue not a cups one. When you install CUPS it does work as advertised then if you want to restrict access then you have to edit config files, Fedora developers have done this. On Mandrake Linux, you setup a printer on machine and then it seen by all computers on the that subdomain as advertised. No fiddling with any kind of config, web based or editing a file. The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Yes, it is mostly a Fedora/Red Hat issue. But to be fair, there has been
a lot of, well, let's call it 'transition' in Fedora/RedHat printing:
lpd to LPRng to cups, and along the way at least one rewrite/redesign of their printtool.
The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Ohh ok... it seems to be a fedora/redhat issue. The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
Well i can inform you that i happily run Mandrake 9.2 i586 FiveStar, and
Mandrake 9.1 before that. Indeed, since i run that distro, all my
printing problems went away.
Maybe it was a litle ignorant to believe, that when Mandrake has solved
the Linux printing problem, other Linux distro's also solved theirs.
Sorry about that.
Robert
I've tried a few distros and had various degress of of "Luck" configuring printers.Chiming in
Unfortunately, for me, I had to use Windows 98 for may tax preparation. It took 3 reboots to The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
install the printer drivers.
i completely disagree. cups is such a great, flexible and cups is great and easy to configure
easy-to-configure and -manage system. what good could that gui-stuff do
if one's literate enough to read a text file and change some lines in it?
if configuring cups is too much hassle for a person well i suggest this
person get a copy of windoze XP, an hp printer an hp jet admin or sth
similar. this combination will do anything this person wants even before
this person even knows what it is she/he might want.
in these times of ever-growing complexity and extremely specialist
knowledge of almost anything in this world i am terrified by an attitude
that demands that computers MUST be the sole island in the middle of all
this complexity where anything MUST work after one click and without any
knowledge of the inner workings of this extremely sophisticated and
complex system. computers by themselves ARE NOT SIMPLE and ARE NOT EASY
TO USE - what might be are the veils other persons cover them with. today
there's systems that are very "easy" to configure, but may be less
flexible, and there's systems harder to configure, but may be more
flexible. if one likes more flexibilty, this person needs more
information, and i think this person must somehow get this information
BEFORE starting to work on the actual problem.
i used to teach a part in sysadmin-classes and was amazed at how (usually
after having absolved the first - usually windoze - parts of the course)
knowledge-free and self-assured the students there started working on a
complex problem: they blindly relied on some "wizards" and were convinced
ANYTHING could be done "intuitively:" "i don't know sh00t about DNS or
whatever a zone is, but surely SOMEWHERE i gotta click the right
mouse-button and it will work...."
not that i want to accuse esr of ANY of this, but my experience with cups
was just the opposite and i think the people of cups and
linuxprinting.org deserve a lot of BIG FAT THANK YOUs.
i had to setup a couple of network printers on with a centralized
printserver in a heterogenous network. took some reading and thinking and
of course i got in moods similar to esr's on the way, but now i know a
little bit about cups and the next setup will be much quicker and easier.
and even though personally i can work better with textconfigs, the webgui
of cups is really cool i think.
I must agree. Compared with - say - Microsoft's own obscure, unreliable, mendacious and misleading printing subsystem, CUPS is more like a breath of fresh air. Sure, my end-users couldn't add or remove printers under CUPS. But then, they couldn't manage it under Windows either.cups is great and easy to configure
cups is great and easy to configure
I understand and agree with ESR's general comments about UIs in Linux. I The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)
do hope, though, that his specific comments about changing CUPS and
redhat-config-printers are taken with a grain of salt by the developers.
I am particularly concerned about the part in which Mr. Raymond argues
that "In order for the nice, user-friendly autoconfiguration stuff [for
CUPS] to work, you have to first edit an /etc file." He is referring to
auto-detecting a printer which is connected to another computer. For
auto-detection to "just" work, the firewall on the computer which is
connected to the printer must allow packets in to the CUPS server on port
631. By default. Yes, he's suggesting that printer sharing should be
made accessible to the world by default. Didn't we used to make fun of
MS for doing this sort of thing?
See, despite the claim that "[His] configuration problem is simple.", it
isn't. Mr. Raymond is not trying to simply connect a printer to a
computer (apparently he did this already, successfully, with the system
called "minx"). Nor is he trying to do the next most complicated thing:
connecting to a printer which is attached to a dedicated print server or
which is network capable by itself. In such situations, the
documentation for the printer or print server will instruct the user how
to proceed (yes, in my experience, even for CUPS on Linux). No, he's
trying to do something which my Aunt Tillie would never have thought of
(assuming that she even owned two computers): using one system as a print
server for the other. Whenever you see the word "server" in the
description of a task I would hope that the "security" warning light goes
off in your head. Making it possible for users to set up servers
_safely_ should be the goal. That pretty much rules out
auto-configuration. Combining security and flexibility is hard. Really,
really hard. And yes, getting things right does require work such as
"reading the documentation". Reading documentation which has been moved
into the UI, e.g. in a help file or a series of context-sensitive text
windows, still counts as reading the documentation.
Programmers might like to believe that they can do anything with their
code, but that CUPS server is never going to be auto-detected while it's
behind a firewall. Computers will never be so simple that the end-user
doesn't have to think. If they don't have to think about one thing
(function) then they have to think about another (security? stability?
performance?) To whichever Fedora developer is looking into this
problem: please don't forget that! Design better UIs, but don't make
Aunt Tillie think that she's doing something safe just because the UI led
her through the whole process so smoothly.
To ESR: Thank You, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)