On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 04:48:39PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
On 19-Feb-07 Brett Parker wrote:
On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 02:18:29PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
On 19-Feb-07 Adam Bower wrote:
On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 10:20:08AM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
So I thought that Ubuntu, with its claimed "ease-of-use", would be a good starting experience. And indeed, much of my "test run" on the live CD confirmed that impression. But if he can't bloody print without wriggling through a hall of mirrors and coming out back-to-front, then I'm sure he won't be impressed.
I'm still thinking this sounds like a livecd buglet of some kind, certainly none of the machines around here running Ubuntu have ever had any of these kinds of problems with printing before.
Certainly googling parts of this suggests that there are problems with printing from the live cd. If you installed the software i'm sure it'd work perfectly. Can you confirm that this is just if running it as a live cd?
Thanks Adam
Yes, confirmed that it was just running as a Live CD -- using it on one of my machines which already has a Linux distribution happily running on it (and, indeed, no intention of installing it on anything myself unless and until (a) I need to upgrade; (b) I'm happy about what I'd be upgrading to!).
Can you give a pointer or two to your google results (or say what the search keywords were)?
[It has occurred to me that a work-round in this case might be to add the "ubuntu" user manually to group "lp" -- which, presumably, did not happen when it was booted from the LiveCD. But, again, this us not the sort of thing a user should need to so, especially when it's someone new to Linux!]
Brett, in view of your angry tone below I'm going to close this discussion, as far as I'm concerned. But, before I do, I want to comment on what seems to me to be an unreasonable remark on your part.
LiveCDs aren't *ever* going to be perfect, there's too many factors to cater for, personally I don't run Ubuntu (and am not planning to anytime soon), but it seems that you're picking on very minor aspects of the system - the fact that it managed to get up and running on your hardware, and the only thing that you've managed to pick on is the printing, seems like a hell of an achievement to me
Printing is not a minor aspect; for most users it is pretty important. One thing my friend specifically asked me about was printing (to which, by the way, I replied that I use a PostScript printer because that's the most straight-forward way on Linux). Ubuntu auto-detected my printer, which proves that it knew what port it was attached to, and (as proved by printing to file) produced PostScript output. What it failed to do was send this to /dev/lp0 which is the parallel port that the printer is attached to. There is nothing whatever exotic about printing to a parallel-port printer -- indeed, it's about as basic as you can get, and has been around since the year dot -- all the more so since no printer driver is required once you have the PS output to send to the port.
Printing is a minor aspect from a livecd point of view, IMO. You should not expect full functionality from a LiveCD, and if you do find bugs or issues you should file a bug report for them, giving them details on the hardware and the actual issues you had.
Also, the fact that "it managed to get up and running on [my] hardware" is nothing great -- it's a very basic 6-year-old desktop with 733MHz Pentium III, 512MB RAM, 2 standard IDE HDDs, 1 standard IDE CDROM, standard old ATI graphics card ... I would be VERY surprised if it had not "managed to get up and running"!
Now throw it at a modern laptop and note that it works there too, then throw it at something else random and note that it works there too, then watch as it doesn't work somewhere and someone *helpfully* files a bug report about it...
What I was hoping for was some elucidation from people who had Ubuntu experience. "Install and suck it and see" is not a solution in the circumstances. I wasn't trying to "pick on" anything; I had been hoping that it would perform properly over the range of basic activities (including printing) and was disappointed that it did not. "The only thing you've managed to pick on" is very wide of the mark indeed: after I'd tried a thing or two (a bit of Solitaire, browsing, testing some of their "examples" files), I tried printing. And it failed. This was not a search for what would fail, but an unexpected encounter with a very basic failure.
You count printing as a "basic" feature, I count it as one of those things that just don't work 99% of the time (having spent many hours dealing with printers on windows systems, I compare the setup on linux to that, and it generally takes me less time to configure on a linux system than a windows one, the *only* printer I've had a different experience with was the Xerox Phaser 8400 we have in the office, now that actually has a nice windows driver installer that detects the networked printer and "just works").
As I said before, though, have you bothered to report this to upstream as a bug in the live cd? If you don't, then you're not helping, merely whining.
The failure is apparently down to the user/permissions tangle, somehow coupled with the unusual treatment of the "root" user. I made the CD with the intention of giving it to my friend to try, as a Live CD, for him to see how he got on with Linux and, hopefully, be impressed by it. Now I won't.
The root user isn't treated that unusually, actually. It's just a locked account. If you actually want someone to be impressed by a system, why not install them a system on some spare kit so that it's a full install that actually demonstrates what is available. Would you expect people that are testing Windows to use Live CDs for that? Would you expect a Solaris Live CD to be anything like a fully installed system?
And, once again, HAVE YOU BOTHERED REPORTING THE BUG TO THE UBUNTU DEVELOPERS WHO WOULD PROBABLY LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU?
I'm not angry, I'm ill, and bored of people saying "this doesn't work", making whacky assumptions that it's to do with a locked root account, and that aren't willing to file bug reports. This is not MS we're talking about - bug reports are actually read and acted upon. PLEASE REPORT THE BUG.
(Sheesh),