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Printer Operating Systems BSD

Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Printing 51

Posted by michael 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."
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Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Printing More

Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Printing

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  • Printing on FreeBSD (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brilinux ( 255400 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @03:53PM (#9902444) Journal
    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.

    • Re:Printing on FreeBSD (Score:2, Interesting)

      by vasqzr ( 619165 )
      Although I mainly use Linux for things such as file/email/proxy servers, I've set up printing before on workstations.

      The last version of RedHat that I used, (7.3) made it pretty easy. There was a control panel where I entered a name for the printer, chose postscript, and gave the ip of the printer. (HP LaserJet 4100). Worked perfectly. Everyone asked how I got web pages to print out without cutting off the right side (anyone who's printed from Internet Explorer knows what I'm talking about)

      It's equally e

  • Need a printer??? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by acidrain ( 35064 )
    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.
    • Hmmm, 3 insightful: man says does not need printer.
    • From the summary:
      As a writer...
      A person who makes their living writing words is replacing a typewriter with a computer and is interested in putting those words on paper - go figure. How is talking about your lack of need for such a thing relevant to the conversation in any way?

  • bad advice (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:06PM (#9902620)
    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 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      RTFA! That's for installation only

    • Re:bad advice (Score:3, Informative)

      by DashEvil ( 645963 )
      You run X as root regardless. It's SETUID.

      • Re:bad advice (Score:5, Informative)

        by Homology ( 639438 ) on Saturday August 07, 2004 @12:10AM (#9906605)
        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.

  • Needlessly difficult... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06, 2004 @07:19PM (#9904595)
    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.
    • You would think you should be able to have lpd listen only on the interfaces you specify (defaulting to only to loopback for example).

      If you have any interfaces you are at all worried about you are running a firewall, right?

  • As if CUPS is difficult? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by macwhiz ( 134202 ) on Saturday August 07, 2004 @10:57PM (#9911508)

    I'd never paid attention to CUPS [cups.org] 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.

  • OK, if I install a whole stack of packages, which no doubt drag in lots more, I can do what I have been doing for years with a one-page shell script, a two line printcap entry and ghostscript.

    I'm sure there must be some advantage of using CUPS which my ancient brain has missed, so can someone enlighten me?

    • Re:CUPS, Why? (Score:3, Informative)

      by macwhiz ( 134202 )

      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
      • Well, most of that comes with the small shell script and ghostscript. Eg, printing from windows in postsccript to a non postscript printer (though samba makes configuring the windows end easier).

        Mind you, sticking the printer on a cheap networkable print server was the best move I ever made in that direction.

        I can see it being useful for large, varied unix instalations.

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