Why not?
Why not?
Posted Jul 9, 2009 16:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: The Google Chrome OS by drag
Parent article: The Google Chrome OS
Printer problems are all userspace problems. I wonder if Google is smart enough to figure out how to make a web application speek to a network'd laser printer... :)You only need to extend browser a bit to make it possible to access raw printer device from it - and then printer supplier can run printer driver in a box...
Posted Jul 9, 2009 17:33 UTC (Thu)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
But it still doesn't really help much. You still need a way to edit postscript files on the fly to add in commands for color or front-to-back printing. Then you still need a way to deal with network printers. And no 'native code' drivers exist for dumb inkjet printer, etc etc.
In order to do printing with 'just a browser on a kernel' your going to essentially have to recreate all the functionality provided by gnome printer dialog, samba, cups, ghostscript, gnome notification system, usb hotplug, network autodiscover protocol support, and probably half a dozen other little things. Printers are a huge PITA and I hate them and they are relatively hard thing to support.
Now granted it's certainly possible to have a browser handle all that, but it would be rather insane.
It is my fondest wish that Google would simply let a distribution handle that and do something like run 'Chrome OS' on top of a Moblin Compliant OpenSuse or Ubuntu OS.
Posted Jul 12, 2009 10:29 UTC (Sun)
by efexis (guest, #26355)
[Link]
Why not?
"In order to do printing with 'just a browser on a kernel'..."Why not?
...you're going to need for your webapp / cloud server to understand how to output your document in your printers language, and you're going to need your browser to let you send that file to your printer.
Why would you need your printer drivers to be stored locally, if your documents aren't?