printing (was Re: [tlug] mozilla)

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 12:33:34PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >>>>> "Scott" == Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com> writes:
> 
>     Scott> 3. For folks like Stephen who love GUI interfaces
> 
> Following you so far ...
> 
>     Scott> (heh, I probably just got plonked by him again)
> 
> *plonk* はジョウダンじゃねぇぜ。  *plink*[1]

Heh, fortunately, I opened this in X so I could read it. (I really
should install kon, but haven't gotten to it)
> 
>     Scott> 4. The one time I tried LPRng it didn't work out of the
>     Scott> box--as you know, I hate setting up printers, so didn't
>     Scott> feel like reading when CUPS was already doing what I wanted
> 
> The main advantage to LPRng, AFAICT, is that it sucked up all my
> printer configurations without a hiccup, but lacks many of lpr's bad
> habits.

I really only need printing to be functional.  That is, I want to be
able to print out an email, a web page, or whatever.  Unfortunately,
something is borked with my wife's Mac so that her local USB printer
doesn't work and she has to print to the deskjet attached to this
FreeBSD box.  It doesn't handle Japanese and when she does a doc, I have
to transfer it to an MS box using the Mac's samba client, then print it
from there--a nuisance, but so infrequent that I haven't bothered to fix
it.

The point of the above long winded paragraph is that I didn't really
have to worry about printing configurations. At work, I leave the
configuring to the MS clients.  Actually, I could probably simply
install the printers locally on the MS boxes and create a TCP/IP port,
but that seems sloppy somehow.  

Going back to the GUI thing, IIRC, LPRng also had a GUI.  I assume there
was a command line interface as well, but I really just gave it a quick
try on Jonathan's recommendation and when it didn't work right away,
said the heck with it.

Going back to Godwin's original question, as I said (twice for emphasis)
I use cups because I'm familiar with it--I really only began using my
*nix boxen as my real workstation around the advent of Gentoo--their
early desktop guide covered cups, I put it in, and it worked.  After
that, when I tried to do more sophisticated things with it, I ran into
problems and fixed most of them.

So, it's really a matter of having little interest in printing and this
is functional, though not perfect.  

As a vi user who is always impressed by emacs people, I would have
thought it had its own printing system built in, but I suppose we always
tend to overestimate those things that we don't understand.  [1]


Footnotes"

[1] "I tried to learn emacs, but gave up and decided to study a simpler
operating system."[2]

[2] Trying to be as funny as Stephen, who did make me laugh out loud
wiht his footnotes, I am chaining them--err, the whole purpose of this
footnote was to say I don't know who made up that statement in footnote
[1] but it's not original. 


-- 

Scott 

PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 D575 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

Dracula: Very impressive hunt. Such power. 
Buffy: That was no hunt. That was just another day on the job. 
Care to step up for some overtime? 
Dracula: We're not going to fight. 
Buffy: Do you know what a Slayer is? 
Dracula: Do you? 
Buffy: Who are you? 
Dracula: I apologize. I assumed you knew. I am Dracula. 
Buffy: Get out!

Attachment: pgp00064.pgp
Description: PGP signature