On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 02:40:06PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
To come back to the main point of the above URL. This article is good, and very accurately aimed.
My point was that I thought it was a misguided article because cups is one of the easiest (and well documented) bits of software I have ever used. I have used cups to configure printing on a network of 10 Linux (and a couple of Macs) machines that I have never even seen because I did it remotely and it took me about 2 or 3 hours with one non-techy user on the phone to make sure the printer was turned on and had paper in it. :)
Just because I dislike ESR for other reasons doesn't actually have much bearing on that article for me (and I never mentioned anything about his attitude on guns, the reasons I dislike him are because of his attitude towards groups of people especially (and not limited to) women, black people and gay people and that quite often he claims to speak for all of the linux community (he most certainly doesn't represent me)) I just plain disagree with what he wrote about cups.
that you need to edit /etc/printcap in a fairly straightforward way for which the "commented" examples in the file provide good prototypes. The 'man' page for printcap tells you all you need
I originally moved to using cups because of trouble attempting to use the old /etc/printcap system (mainly because having to tell it which filters to use with non-postscript printers used to give me headaches) :)
Eric Raymond's blast against CUPS struck me as totally accurate; it mirrored faithfully so many of the experiences I had suffered.
It struck me as a wholly inaccurate article, I could not imagine problems with using cups now (although some of the early releases (so back around 2000, were very very ropey I have to admit) it just goes to show how subjective this computing stuff is and the experiences that people have. For example on the same network as I mentioned above it took 3 days of on-site work for the highly skilled (they had about 10 years experience between them in many technologies and did know what they were talking about) Windows people to get their printer working for their 10 machines and people say that using Windows is easier... They also ended up printing to my cups printer system after I had to install Samba for them so they could help their users :)
I seem to find that some jobs are hard to do in Windows also, so again quite often people seem to use the word "difficult" when they can mean "different". I know some things can be harder and non-intuitive in Linux but it works both directions, lots of tasks can be difficult if not possible to achieve in windows, when I first got my DVD burner I had problems getting it working in Linux so tried to get it working in Windows and I never succeceded! If people only wanted everything to be simple and easy they would all use Macs? seeing how that the majority of people use Windows (and most of them can't do things like simple tasks) would suggest that it is "computers" that need to become easier rather than Linux (or Mac or Windows).
I couldn't imagine anyone in my family (apart from perhaps my technically minded brothers) managing to get a printer or driver installed in any OS. I still shudder when I recall going round my freinds house who was playing quake in software mode at 320x240 resolution (when they had a very fast gfx accelerator card) because they hadn't actually installed any drivers for their graphics card (as far as they knew the computer was displaying pictures so it was working and making their gaming experience much better) and on the same day helping them configure dialup networking so they could connect to the internet.
I can think of many other examples of where people have had problems with their computers and many instances where working in a corporate environment that non-technical users have preferred to use a Linux desktop over a Windows desktop because the Linux box is more stable and does what they expect despite them not being of a technical background.
Adam