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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."
Having just installed FreeBSD, I too had to configure my printer, yet this article made it seem overly complicated. Of course, I used KDE and CUPS to set up my USB HP-5150, but when I set the same up on Gentoo by hand, it was not that difficult. This makes using *nix systems seem harder for the desktop than it is.
There is no reason for printer setup to be complicated -- use of lpd with a couple of scripts and a ghostscript filter (for non PS capable inkjets) could easily be provided (perhaps commented out) in the printcaps for all the BSDs and as an option in Linux distros. This is all 95% of users really need or want, yet somehow this simple solution isn't provided as an option. Instead users end up searching for an unnecessary addon they hope will make printer setup easier than the lpd route (which at present often involves silly googling and guessing to find the info) but generally speaking does not make things especially simple at all.
Another pet peeve: You would think you should be able to have lpd listen only on the interfaces you specify (defaulting to only to loopback for example). Yet even OpenBSD (to the best of my knowledge) does not provide this simple security enhancement.
Hmm I have SuSE 9.1 personal (focused on providing a slick desktop) and OpenBSD 3.4 (the base install is clearly not focused on the desktop at all) + KDE, installed on two identical (slowish 400 Mhz Celeron) machines. It makes for an interesting side by side comparison. Once you finally get it booted up (SuSE is very slow to boot up), some apps (like Firefox) definately are a bit faster on SuSE -- and there is no doubt SuSE has a more polished desktop esp. regarding the pretty graphical configuration/management utilities. But from any objective standpoint, once they are both set up, the differences just aren't a horribly big deal -- OS zealots will be terribly, terribly disappointed. Except for the lack of availability of a few applications on OpenBSD, you would be pretty pressed to tell the difference -- and if you have a faster machine, I expect it would be even harder since the benefits of the preemptive kernel and thread optimizations aren't very visible in the presence of vast excesses of raw computing horsepower. I'd still recommend SuSE for the desktop -- but I really can't justify calling anyone using OpenBSD as a desktop crazy either. It just isn't a big freak'n deal.
No big deal for most, unless one wants top performance 3D. One difference, though, is that OpenBSD has made many security enhancements to X, like privilege separation, removing suid-bit from xterm and xconsole, compiling X with ProPolice (to lessen danger of buffer overflow exploits).
I'd never paid attention to CUPS until Apple slid it under my Mac OS X installation. Once I took a look at it, I really came to appreciate it. Now I put it on all my UNIX boxes. I've even convinced my workplace to adopt it.
Once the software is installed, it's dead easy to set up, especially if you're using a recent PostScript-capable printer. Most recent printers support Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) directly on their network card. CUPS speaks IPP and PostScript natively. If you set up Service Location Protocol (SLP) support, you don't even have to configure the printer -- it configures itself. There's a reason Apple adopted this software!
Add the gimp-print driver package, and you can print to just about anything.
It's a far sight better than dealing with the various filters in BSD lpr, and immeasurably better than Solaris' print subsystem.
No need for that even, unless you want to share with other batch processing jobs. BSD does quite a reasonable job of keeping interactive things going while batch jobs do their business.
I set off a recompile of samba on the wrong machine the other week, by typing at the wrong window, and didn't notice my desktop was 90-odd percent occupied with compilation until the bizzare throbbing red corpuscle gkrellm uses to indicate high load was uncovered when I moved a window.
Modern over-muscled CPUs, modern memory sizes and good disk access subsystems are wonderful things.
_O_
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