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!]
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,