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.
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"!
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.
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.
Ted.
Tell you what, find me a working windows live cd that will do printing and might even have some drivers for common printers...
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 - I'm not entirely convinced that most people would expect a completely working environment on multiple hardware platforms from the same CD with fully functioning "wizardry" straight out of the box... heck, you ever tried installing or running windows - the setup of that then getting all your hardware working takes me about 20 times longer than it does for the equivelent and more productive setup of a debian system on the same hardware.
Now, what you could do is actually debug why the "ubuntu" user can't print, or report a bug on the ubuntu livecd explaining what happened so that they can try to reproduce it... both would be more productive and probably more for the good of the community than going "Again, this is not the sort of thing a user should need to do, especially when it's someone new to Linux!" (typos fixed, btw). I don't know how many windows systems you've tried to install from scratch with "interesting" hardware, but I know that the last time that I wanted a scanner to work here at work it was *very* easy to sort on the linux workstations, and it took someone 3 quarters of a day to do it on a windows machine (on the linux workstations it was *literally* plug, fire up xsane, play).
So, yes, in summary - just how much *are* you expecting from a live cd
it's only supposed to be a demonstration of the basic underlaying operating system, and is never going to be the same as running the full blown installed OS.
Thanks,
Brett Parker
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