Hi Folks,
This evening I downloaded the ISO for Ubuntu 6.10 (the latest), burnt it to CD, and gave it a whirl (using the CD as a live CD).
Quite a lot of fun really -- this is designed to appeal! But I had a weird experience with printing.
I used the GUI to add a printer. It autodetected my HP Laserjet 1300 and proposed (which I accepted) the PostScript driver for it.
Then I opened one of its Examples files (an Open Office "doc") in OpenOffice Writer ("Word" to you ...), and tried printing it. Nothing happened.
'lpq' showed that the job was queued and printing, but nothing happened at the printer.
Eventually, I killed the job with 'lprm', went back to the document, and printed it to file "test.ps". I checked (using "less") that this was PostScript.
Then, at the console (Ctrl-Alt-F1, user = "ubuntu"), I tried
lpr test.ps
and nothing happened. I then tried
cat test.ps > /dev/lp0
and got "Permission denied". So I tried (being aware of the issue)
sudo cat test.ps >/dev/lp0
with the same result. Permissions on /dev/lp0 were something like (should have written it down ... )
rw- rw- --- root root
So I bit the bullet, executed
sudo passwd root
thus creating a "normal" root account. The I logged in as root, cd'd to /home/ubuntu, and again did
cat test.ps > /dev/lp0
and this time it worked. This suggests that "ordinary" users ("ubuntu" in this case) don't have permission to print -- no doubt there's a work-round, but it was not offered up in the printer installation dialogue.
But when (still as root) I did
lpr test.ps
I got the message that no printer was available! So it looks as though resources like a printer are set up on a per-user basis!
This all strikes me as a weird and bewildering tangle. I find Ubuntu's marginalising of root irritating anyway, but the rest of it seems just crazy. And this is supposed to be "Linux for the masses" ...
Maybe I've misunderstood something, or missed some obvious trick, so I'd welcome comments.
In case it may be relevant: when I booted off the CD, I chose the "Safe Graphics Mode" option.
With thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Feb-07 Time: 22:00:45 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Sun, Feb 18, 2007 at 10:00:53PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
This all strikes me as a weird and bewildering tangle. I find Ubuntu's marginalising of root irritating anyway, but the rest of it seems just crazy. And this is supposed to be "Linux for the masses" ...
Maybe it's just a bug of the live CD? I've not had any problems with printing as a user here but i've never run the live CD other than to install with.
I also don't find the having to use sudo thing such a bad idea. I've seen far too many documents on the net telling people to "make such and such work, login as root and do this and this and this" getting your root user back isn't much work for someone who knows what they're doing, and if you don't know then maybe you should take the time to read a few docs and understand what's going on. Given one of the main problems with windows has been its reliance on everyone having admin rights (it isn't much fun trying to run an XP desktop as a "normal" user and use admin for installing everything) and the problems that has created, it gives very good credence for people having to use sudo.
Thanks Adam
On 2/18/07, Ted Harding ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
sudo cat test.ps >/dev/lp0
This won't do what you expect. The pipe to /dev/lp0 will still be performed as you, not root. Extra quotes might help, but you'd have to consult the shell manual.
with the same result. Permissions on /dev/lp0 were something like (should have written it down ... )
rw- rw- --- root root
If you really want to hack about as root, without assigning a password to root, just do: sudo su -
Otherwise, I've no idea why printing isn't working for you.
Tim.
"Tim Green" timothy.j.green@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/18/07, Ted Harding ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
sudo cat test.ps >/dev/lp0
This won't do what you expect. The pipe to /dev/lp0 will still be performed as you, not root. Extra quotes might help, but you'd have to consult the shell manual.
My usual trick is: cat test.ps | sudo tee /dev/lp0 >/dev/null
How do you eat yours?
Regards,
On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 08:56:21AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
"Tim Green" timothy.j.green@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/18/07, Ted Harding ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
sudo cat test.ps >/dev/lp0
This won't do what you expect. The pipe to /dev/lp0 will still be performed as you, not root. Extra quotes might help, but you'd have to consult the shell manual.
My usual trick is: cat test.ps | sudo tee /dev/lp0 >/dev/null
How do you eat yours?
My usual trick is to make sure that cups is running correctly and that my user has the right groups to print... I do find that quite useful ;)
On 19-Feb-07 MJ Ray wrote:
"Tim Green" timothy.j.green@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/18/07, Ted Harding ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
sudo cat test.ps >/dev/lp0
This won't do what you expect. The pipe to /dev/lp0 will still be performed as you, not root. Extra quotes might help, but you'd have to consult the shell manual.
My usual trick is: cat test.ps | sudo tee /dev/lp0 >/dev/null
How do you eat yours?
The Ubuntu permissions on /dev/lp0, I see, are
crw- rw- --- root lp
so root can cat to it, but other users can't, of course.
But, frankly, if an ordinary user can't do
lpr test.ps
without going through those hoops (or similar) then the whole business strikes me as daft. Surely lpr should run as user "lp"?
The reason I was looking at Ubuntu is that a friend of mine is very interested in trying out Linux, being smart about using computers but so far only experienced in a Windows environment, and clearly GUI-oriented.
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.
So I'm wondering now what alternative distribution would give someone a pleasant and satisfying first experience, and at the same time demonstrate the genuine qualites that make Linux a far superior operating system.
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Feb-07 Time: 10:20:02 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
Hi I recommend Ubuntu 6.10, I installed it and it prints ok on my Hp PSc 2115. only problems i am having are with playing dvds but i think this may be my drive. I like Ubuntu, but at present mainly use xp on my main computer and have fun with Ubuntu on an 4 year old laptop. Barry
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
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!]
With thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Feb-07 Time: 14:18:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
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,
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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-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Feb-07 Time: 16:44:35 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
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),
In my opinion choosing to ignore what is IMO one of the better choices for a beginner distribution based on one bug specific to the liveCD version is not doing your friend any favours.
But anyway that's already been said by others. What I really wanted to add is that I don't think liveCD's are the best way to expose potential newcomers to Linux. LiveCD's have their place, they are great for resurrecting a shafted system (this is about all I use them for) and for confirming basic hardware compatibility before committing to a full installation.
However when you use them to enable people to experience linux for the first time you have a problem. You can tell them until you are blue in the face that it will be slower because it is running from the CD ROM, but I guarantee that they will walk away thinking that it's linux that is slow.
Take it from someone who spends a lot of time demonstrating systems to potential users. If your demonstration is plagued by something as obvious as speed issues it doesn't matter how you explain that when they commit to an installation it will be faster, they will never get over the fact that it is slow at the moment.
On 19-Feb-07 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
In my opinion choosing to ignore what is IMO one of the better choices for a beginner distribution based on one bug specific to the liveCD version is not doing your friend any favours.
But anyway that's already been said by others. What I really wanted to add is that I don't think liveCD's are the best way to expose potential newcomers to Linux. LiveCD's have their place, they are great for resurrecting a shafted system (this is about all I use them for) and for confirming basic hardware compatibility before committing to a full installation.
However when you use them to enable people to experience linux for the first time you have a problem. You can tell them until you are blue in the face that it will be slower because it is running from the CD ROM, but I guarantee that they will walk away thinking that it's linux that is slow.
Well, neither of us has spare kit to do a real installation on at the moment, so it's the best way to give the guy a way of trying it out. (I can always show Linux running on my laptop, but that would only be a demo). And, for distance reasons, neither of is likely to spend much time at the other's place.
Regarding your comment that "they will walk away thinking that it's linux that is slow", I don't think so in this case. He's quite capable of understanding the point, and in any case when an app is actually running (once downloaded from the CD) it's pretty snappy.
Take it from someone who spends a lot of time demonstrating systems to potential users. If your demonstration is plagued by something as obvious as speed issues it doesn't matter how you explain that when they commit to an installation it will be faster, they will never get over the fact that it is slow at the moment.
Well, as I say, I don't think that applies in this case, though I can well imagine scenarios where it would!
Anyway, trhere are other distributions with live CDs, so I'll have a look at those, perhaps.
Thanks for the coments, though. Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Feb-07 Time: 22:24:46 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------