Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Printing

uninet writes "As a writer, the only reason Ed Hurst ever got his first computer was because it was far more efficient than a typewriter, and certainly more readable than his own handwriting. To enjoy that efficiency, however, you need a working printer, and Ed explores accomplishing just that with FreeBSD in this piece."

Comments

bad advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Right off the bat...

life is much simpler if you login as root and run your desktop by typing startx at the command line

Uh huh, run X as root. *PLONK*

Re:bad advice

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA! That's for installation only

Re:bad advice

[DashEvil]

You run X as root regardless. It's SETUID.

Re:bad advice

[Homology]

You run X as root regardless. It's SETUID.

That depends. OpenBSD has patched XFree86 to make it more secure. Among things they have done is to use privilege separation for X, so not the entire X needs to run as root. They also made a ptm device that allows non-privileged processes to allocate a properly-permissioned pty, so the suid bit is removed from xterm and xconsole. Recently, OpenBSD made X work after enabling ProPolice for it, thus making buffer overflows less of a danger.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Good News Everyone!
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article, Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election.
You can read more about FreeBSD here

If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonflyBSD
Enjoy!

Re:Does BSD have a pre-emptive kernel?

[torstenvl]

Yes, "BSD" has a pre-emptive kernel. BSD/OS has a pre-emptive kernel. BSDi was bought by Walnut Creek and they are providing a snapshot of their code to the FreeBSD team who is using some of the BSDi team's work to make their own kernel pre-emptive, as well. Please see "Revamping the BSD multiprocessor code" at http://www.daemonnews.org/200008/dadvocate.html

You can also see a good argument against it, dating back to 2000 from Matt Dillon:
"I would not characterize this as 'biting the bullet'. Having a preemptive kernel is unlikely to improve performance. The only reason there might be preemption at all is to deal wth interrupts. Interrupts currently preempt supervisor code. If interrupts are moved to interrupt threads then interrupt threads would need to be able to preempt supervisor code. In this fashion the supervisor thread would be preempted, but that is very different from having supervisor threads preempt other supervisor threads (something we probably will not do)."
See http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=65989 +0+archive/2000/freebsd-arch/20000528.freebsd-arch

Actually, the whole discussion is very interesting and I have learned a lot this morning about SMP and preemption and so on from reading. Thanks for bringing this up. :)

Re:I'd use BSD for my own writing

[tigga]

major recompile because of a minor update

If minor update you do because of security reasons you may try to install freebsd-update from ports. It could fetch and install binary updates. No need to recompile anything.

Re:CUPS, Why?

[macwhiz]

CUPS beats out good old printcap thusly:

• If your printer doesn't support PostScript, CUPS gives it a PostScript interpreter.
• CUPS automatically converts your print jobs from a wide range of formats to PostScript.
• CUPS supports PPD files. That means it supports all the special features of your printer. If your printer isn't PostScript, it can generate a PPD allowing access to the printer's raster-driver features.
• Your Windows and Mac boxes can print to your CUPS-attached printer using PostScript, too.
• It supports ZeroConf, so when you add a new CUPS-equipped system to your existing network, it self-configures all the advertised print queues you already have.
• It not only speaks LPR, but also HP JetDirect and IPP. You can actually get printer status.
• Because everything gets converted to PostScript, you can easily change font options, page layout, etc. from the command line.
• All your UNIX boxes now configure printers the same way. The print commands are all the same. Consistency is good when you have many types of system!
• Convenient browser-based GUI, or traditional CLI configuration.
• Better security.

There's other features, too. Those are the ones I can think of, off the top of my head. It brings UNIX printing out of the teletype era and up to the level of Mac OS and Windows.