Slashdot Mirror
VA and HP Join Forces for Linux and Samba
aaf writes "VA and HP are working together to improve printing under Linux and Samba. Everything is and will be Open Source and the initial focus will be on improving existing Open Source printing software and enabling advanced functionality for Laserjets. It's all being developed and managed through SourceForge." While this is all LaserJet specific, I can't help but think that open sourcing everything will enable the community to build stronger cross-platform printing solutions for Linux.
I dont see why Linux has bad printing mechanisms...i think lpr is perfectly good as a remote print spooler and the drivers + printtool utility with redhat work great with all my HP printers.
Heck, ive even begun to replace HP JetDirect print servers with redhat or slackware boxen..do we really need another print system ? Besides, even the CUPS guys are trying to build one...
This is one of the few remaining spots in Linux that just plain stinks. I used to say that printing and ppp made Linux difficult/impossible for the masses to use. PPP is finally pretty easy to use, with tools like RP3, the debian PPP support, kPPP, etc. Looks like printing will finally work as well.
I spent many, many hours trying to get my Linux workstation talking to the HP printers at work; after much failure I finally had success. I've never gotten printing to work reasonably well at all at home; trying to connect to my roommate's printer just didn't happen. We ended up sneaker-netting it, with printing to postscript and all. I had similar results with a Deskjet 600 physically connected to the box (ie, no network in the middle). Stuff would come out of the printer, but nothing was ever quite right. It was a classic case of configuration being prohibitively difficult, FOR NO GOOD REASON.
Let's hope that what comes of this announcement can change things.
Actually, HP's base network printer drivers are mostly shell scripts - which are perfectly readable. Copyrighted, but readable and editable.
Last time I checked, you could download them for free off of the HP site.
Local print drivers are another story, but any printer with really really cool features should be networked anyway.
- bridgette
HP's WebJetAdmin is network printer config/management software that supports RedHat.
- bridgette
That is the question I have asked myself many, many times, whenever I play the role of "Linux advocate" and introducing Linux to the people around me.
I can show them the amazing things Linux can do; The incredible value Linux represents; The wide array (and getting ever more wider) of softwares that run under Linux; The many platforms Linux runs under; but when it comes to printing, Linux takes a back seat, a back, back, back seat.
If the joint effort between HP and VA is successful, then, I do not have to ask myself the "To print or not to print" question again, and I can go show them the amazing things Linux can do and I can put them on paper/slide/whatever.
It's just another right step towards world domination.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I yearn for the day when companies write drivers for Linux(/Unix) and opensource them so that all Unixes can
share in the glory, and we all laugh at Windows for a decade because it's fragmented, hard to use for longer
than 30 minutes, and it locks you into proprietary solutions.
Actually, what Linux (and Unix in general) needs is an architecture where it is straight forward for printer manufacturers to WRITE a (possibly binary-only) driver. The current solutions involving ghostscript and friends are too troublesome to write "drivers" for, requires the drivers be released under cirtain licences and does take some brains from the user to make work right.
A unified system into which an arbitrary driver could easilly be plugged would yield a lot. Using something like the input- and output-filters of lpr is one option, which all too often seems to cause troubles for people. Ohh, and by the way that has the added overhead of the driver having to be able to interpret postscript (= what most Unix programs generate per default) in addition to its own "printer language".....
That said, we also need decent libraries for interfacing the printer subsystem when writing applications - or have I been ignorant to what has been happening?
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
This sounds pretty much like the 'server end' of printing... which is all very well for business use, but I'd like to see an attempt to address the 'desktop end'.
What I want to see is 1440 dpi support for Epson Stylus printers, including the six-colour models. Once we have drivers for the photorealistic printers, we remove another significant 'but Linux cant do X' argument from the Windows crowd. After all, even if the GIMP is made to support CMYK, we get a quality Illustrator/Freehand clone, and a decent DTP package (hmm, will that wish list be resolved Real Soon Now?), we still can't get the best possible printing out of our shiny new colour printers...
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
... open the specifications, if not the code, to the Deskjet printers.
Most home users, when they buy a HP, will buy a color inkjet, notibly the deskjets. These so call "Winprinters" require a Windows driver to convert the data to "Performance Printing Archetecture" (ie, kills your box's performance in order to print) and the PPA specs are NOT open. Fortunately for me and other unfortunate deskjet users, some brave soul out there had wrote a program called PBM2PPA that coverts postscript bitstream to PPA for printing. Of course, the conversion does a toll on my box and is only good for black and white, but at least printing is now a possibility...
-=- SiKnight
These people are soooooooo amusing! They'll trademark anything!. In fact, I guess I can start dropping TM at random places...
Ciao(TM)
This is great news, but...
Aren't we going to have too many different printing solutions out there? This announcement follows Corel's announcement about their own linux printing system. They may both be great systems, but probably incompatible and will leave application developers confused.
Having multiple solutions for the same niche is normal for open source (KDE/Gnome and countless other examples) and for most cases I think it is actually a good thing. But somehow for printing I don't think this would be a good idea. I prefer to have just one way to print. Currently the de-facto standard is simply PostScript. It's not perfect but it works.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
There's no problems or issues with remotely using the advanced HP printer functionality embedded within their windows drivers. Their printer drivers can occasionally be...ahhh, ornery to install(to say the least), but they *do* distribute packages pretty much ready to be remotely installed via Samba.
:-)
I'm not just speaking from my own personal usage--my "mere" Pentium 120 w/ 64MB of EDO SIMMs managed to serve the print needs of between 280 and 500 students distributed among about a dozen dorms across campus using Samba and the Caldera Openlinux Novell code.
The server never even broke a sweat. I pretty much only had one chronic outage, and that was because of a rather nasty bug in Windows' TCP/IP stack. But heh, at least I got to discover it.
The press release is pretty short on facts, but I'd *guess* the following functionality is being worked on:
A) Bidirectional Status Updates. As far as I know, Samba can't reflect back complex or custom status messages from the printer to the user.
B) Document Titles. Samba doesn't know how to extract from Windows the title name of a print job--a common solution is to force Postscript prints and then extract the job title from the PS header, but that's not particularly the "correct" solution, particularly for a company like HP which has quite an investment in this little language called PCL...
C) Database hooks. My print system had a rather extensive logging system, but it just output to plaintext. Samba's internal logs are all debug oriented. I wouldn't be surprised to see an "enterprise-class project" involving Samba to dump its logs straight into a SQL database.
D) Enterprise-scale configuration managers. SWAT's good for what it is, but HP's golden cow is its laser printers and what they can do for businesses. If they're going into this, corps are saying that they want to follow Cisco's(ObPlug) lead and base their printing architectures around Linux and Samba. If HP wants to remain able to sell a competitive print management solution in that kind of market, contributing to Samba is an obvious move.
E) Linux drivers. There are lots of features which don't exist on the Linux side which are standard on Windows. HP can simplify the installation and improve the feature-completeness of their printers for Linux clients, as well as allow IT staffs to implement high end filtering systems(i.e. force all prints to possess a confidentiality watermark) for their printers.
Congrats to VA Linux, btw! We owe someone there some serious thanks. HP on board should be interesting.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
So what sort of binary are these "Binary" filters going to be written in then? It wouldn't be i386 binary would it by any chance??? How is that going to run on my Alpha then?
It is very easy to campaign against the Microsoft monopoly whilst supporting the i386 one!!
While I agree that it would be better to device a truely "open" approach, I also believe that it's not a very realistic goal. Face it: there are companies who go great lengths keeping secrets, and who believe that their own printer language is the most significant of all secrets. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to convince them all to give up that idea? Indeed - however I also take the more pragmatic approach, and merely saying that IF we want more support for "our" operating system from hardware manufacturers (such as printer manufacturers), then we have to (at least initially) play by their rules.
Giving companies an opportunity to make binary-only drivers for their choise of Linux-platform and release alongside the binary-only versions of drivers for Windows and MacOS clearly cannot be a step in the wrong direction?
Once they're on the band-wagon, then may realize that the platform-requests (valid - such as yours - saying "Why is Alpha / PPC / Sparc / x86 / StrongArm / mk68 not supported?") and requests for features, updates and such COMBINED with the willingness from the community to put in an active effort in developing and maintaining such themself is a motivation to give away also the source code.
I believe, that most HW-manufacturers make money from MAKING HARDWARE not from writing drivers. I also believe, that most HW-manufacturers want access to as big a share of the market as possible. And I guess that the reason many haven't been supporting Linux and other unices is, that the market share is rather small and the efforts required to support that market is rather large (qua the lack of standardized, driver-based architectures).
Besides, I am not one of those, who believe that all software should be GPL'ed. I believe that it is the developers right to choose whatever license he or she wants - and the users right to decide to use it or not.
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
There is decent linux support for HP's NETWORK printers.
The LJ4000 supports PS and PCL so I have no idea why you must resort to ascii. If you have a JetDirect card, you should be able to configure it under linux with WebJetAdmin. I don't know why someone would want to put a high end laser printer on a paralel port anyway. At any rate, your LJ4000 problems should be fixable.
The 697C is only supported for the desk top, it's lame that you can't get good *NIX support for the lower end printers, but the network printer software only supports network printers.
- bridgette
That architecture (to develop printer drivers for Linux) is already available with CUPS (http://www.cups.org, GPL'd)
Debian is including CUPS and LPR in their next distribution, and we're hoping more vendors will do the same.
As for libraries, there are several people working on that, most notably Corel, the KDE folks, the GNOME folks, and the VA Linux folks. We've contributed code to the Corel (LGPL'd) and VA Linux efforts already.
I print, therefore I am.
Not only are LaserJets by far one of the most popular printer families used in business, most of the other laser class printers out there emulate HP printers. So this stuff is really a lot more applicable than it might seem. Software designed for LaserJets should work without modification on a lot of other brands of printers, and as long as it is open sourced, any minor differences and/or additional features in other brands of printers should be able to be tweaked by others in the community.
I would think that this is a win-win for HP, as it should help them sell printers. Printers are probably HP's most successful long-term products. It also should help HP/UX, as you know, Samba isn't Linux specific.
The one thing that's bothered me is HP's refusal to acknowledge this fact and state on their web site "our printers work with (or w/o, as appropriate to the printer) Ghostscript on Unix." It's all microsoft this, microsoft that. I'm mildly confused that they go to the trouble to make sure they're compliant and compatible, then don't bother to advertise the fact. So in that sense, maybe this is a step in the right direction. But we really don't need more printing systems, and we really don't need major changes to the existing ones. It pretty much just works great already! Now, inkjet support, that's another matter...
Maybe I'm being ignorant here, but why couldn't some sort of module be written for the WINE project that allows Windows drivers to be used directly?
Again, I may be in the dark here, but would the ideal situation be to hack out the printing API for windows and then just go and use the drivers that come with your printer out of the box?
Sure, that means that the drivers would remain closed source, but since they're only useful with the hardware that one buys and come with that hardware anyway, it seems that doing this once would save people and manufacturers the time and money it takes to port their drivers to other OS's.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Actually, I just bought a Postscript printer for $350 once shipping & handling was factored in. It's the Lexmark Optra E310, and it handles Postscript Level 2 natively. List price on Lexmark's website is $400, although a Price Watch search ought to turn up some cheaper prices. Do a DejaNews search for "Lexmark Optra E310" and you can read about other people's experiences with this printer. I bought mine from Electrified, where they list refurbished Optra E310's for $300 ($299, technically). Note that that does not include a parallel cable (though it does include a toner cartridge, otherwise I'd be a little steamed), which wound up costing me an extra $15. Add hefty shipping & handling fees (due, I suppose, to the weight of the package, although I'm sure I got overcharged there too), it still came out to about $350, which is cheaper than anywhere else I found.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."