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Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Printing

Posted by michael on from the in-the-beginning-was-the-teletype dept.

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."

5 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Printing on FreeBSD by brilinux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. bad advice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    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*

    1. Re:bad advice by Homology · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

  3. Needlessly difficult... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. As if CUPS is difficult? by macwhiz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.