Slashdot Mirror
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.
To enjoy that efficiency, however, you need a working printer
The only thing I use my printer for is printing out the odd map from the internet. And I don't need that. I think I would rather read on a monitor at this point then dig through some crummy stack of paper.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
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*
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
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.
If the only thing you are going to do is use your computer as a typewriter, BSD is absolutely perfect for you (even though you might as well use some free DOS). On the other hand, if you want to play many commercial games, you are better off with some sort of Win32, and if you use your computer for real work, or as a server, I would recommend Linux.
Hey stupid, are you so ignorant that you don't even yet know that BSD is dead? What kind of writer are you and do you really have anything interesting to tell people if you don't even know such basic facts everyone else knows?
You can compile Linux kernel so that they are pre-emptive, which prevets any hardware or user software-related hanging. This makes Linux so much better for the Desktop, that comparing it to BSD would be insulting.
dead, daed, dade, deda, aedd, eadd, aded, ddea, ddae, edad
I'd use BSD for my own writing, but if 99.99% of your CPU time is spent on a major recompile because of a minor update, a typewriter is actually faster! It doesn't matter who "fast" BSD is, it will use most of its "speed" on recompiling itself.
Moderation: -1 (Dead)
A New Elegy for BSD
Composed upon seeing a bereaved BSD user.
My bedside clock pounds seconds into days--
Now two a.m., now almost two-oh-one--
My sleepless eyes grow teary as I gaze
Into the night and think of bygone fun.
For BSD is dead, dead ere its prime;
Dead, oh! dead, before its thirtieth year.
Almighty Linux, in but little time,
Destroyed the OS I once held dear.
Like Orpheus, I languished in my pain
When the cold grave swallowed Eurydice;
I piped my woeful song of sighs in vain
For nothing could revive FreeBSD.
Young Dragonfly now goes where Ekko led;
I cry to think of Open and of Net.
If tears could open coffins--raise the dead!--
Then BSD might have a future yet.
My tears have drenched the pillow that was dry.
Tomorrow will my sorrow come again.
I lie back down and tell myself the lie,
"FreeBSD lives on in OS X."
Wouldn't it be nice if printing just worked on BSD? Don't get me wrong, I love BSD and won't use anything elese, because BSD makes me look elite. It would still be nice if this worked though.
Best BSD troll ever
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.
Suggested topics:
* "How to setup XFree86 in BSD"
* "bash: using it on FreeBSD"
* "Xemacs on FreeBSD - a great guide for all FreeBSD users"
* "Using C to create GTK apps on FreeBSD"
* "Ruby on Linux and on FreeBSD"
* "Using GUIs on FreeBSD - they're much different, than on linux"
Could you tell me, what's so really different about printing in FreeBSD, than printing in Linux once you get proper software installed?
Why the fuck do people keep writing so damn stupid articles? Are they clueless morons? We're living in 21st century, HELLO!!, idiots! There's POSIX, there's a lot of code ported, there's Cygwin and there's native XEmacs, PHP and MySQL for win32. And, I assume, there's already a HOWTO on setting up your printer. If you're not a clueless moron, you'll use the same howto on both Linux and BSD platforms. PERIOD!
Get a fucking clue. There are *many* different things about FreeBSD vs Linux, but printing is *NOT* one of them. Cups is the same on all platforms it supports. There are other things, that you should wrote in context of FreeBSD. Priting is *not*. Period, idiots.
Actually, Mr. Troll, printing does not work in BSD very well, that why more articles need to be written about it (so that people would think: "Gee it looks like I'll eventually get printing to work if I read all these"). Also writing more articles about BSD makes the open source community think that it is not dead yet.
I'm sure there must be some advantage of using CUPS which my ancient brain has missed, so can someone enlighten me?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
The question I have is "what exactly is scripting" and "debugging" and how I am supposed to debug? Can someone with some techno experience explain what is scripting, coding, etc...Also, what is a "RunTime Error". The exact line that pops up says: "A runtime error has occurred. Do you wish to debug? Line:52 Error 'null' is null or not an object" What does this mean?
What was that about BSD people being superior to the unwashed Linux masses?
Hmm.. got me some usb connected hp printer/scanner thingy.. went to their site, saw I needed some hpijs 'driver' for Linux..
/usr/ports/print/hpijs and check.. its there.. make install.. follow half a screen of instructions at the end and my printing worked.. ( cd /usr/local/share/doc/ is a good idea as well
I blindly type cd
KDE didn't have any trouble with it either.
Now.. getting scanning to work with this thing is another story...
At any rate.. might be different with other printers.. I don't use printers much.