[Desktop_printing] Role of CUPS and error handling]]

Ulrich Wehner uwehner at lanier.com
Mon Apr 3 08:26:17 PDT 2006


All,

i am looking forward to heated discussions on the topic of standards that 
make it easier for us (Vendors that is) to support you.

we (Lanier and Ricoh) have chosen to proivde all our PPDs to 
linuxprinting.org, thus allowing both the end-users and the Distro vendors 
to have access to all our drivers. The idea is that the topic of having to 
install a driver for our models should (hopefully) never come up.

since our printers support PCL5, PCL6 or Postscript that is all tha tis 
needed. for the more proprietary printstreams it gets more 
complicated......

happy to see that SUSE 10 and Mandriva do include our drivers in-box.

now: a somewhat standardized method of installing drivers (either manually 
or using the "vendor CD") would help us.

Clearly, most of our printers will always be in a commercial environment, 
users can just call our 1-800 number for free support.

many home users with their little inkjets do not have this luxury. They 
need a CD (or an in-box driver)

We do provide installers for Windows, MacOSX, and most commercial UNIXes 
already. I am sure that adding a Linux installer CD is just a matter of 
asking for it.

LSB is clearly one vehicle to standardize. Standards do not keep distro 
vendors from providing their own tools.....

I am all about choice, still as a vendor, we have to support Microsoft, 
Novell, Mainframe, AS\400, Mac OSX, already. Linux has just such a 
proliferation of tools, policies and "special" configurations. (just think 
of Ubuntu where CUPS webinterface is disabled, YAST, kprinter, gnome's 
setup tools)

Standards would really help. At least one method that will always 
work.....

Oh yeah and easy too.

Regards
Uli Wehner
Solutions Engineer
(770) 493 2324



Michael Sweet <mike at easysw.com> 
Sent by: desktop_printing-bounces at lists.osdl.org
04/03/2006 10:15

To
desktop_printing at lists.osdl.org
cc

Subject
[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Re: AW: [Desktop_printing] Role of CUPS and error 
handling]]






Did it again...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: AW: [Desktop_printing] Role of CUPS and error 
handling]
Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2006 10:13:31 -0400
From: Michael Sweet <mike at easysw.com>
Organization: Easy Software Products
To: Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de>
References: <443119FC.8050704 at easysw.com> 
<Pine.LNX.4.58.0604031515400.9554 at wotan.suse.de>

Johannes Meixner wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Apr 3 08:50 Michael Sweet wrote (shortened):
>> Johannes Meixner wrote:
>>> ...
>>> I cannot imagine any problems regarding usability here.
> 
> I meant only usability (i.e. from the end-users point of view).

Well, whether something even runs is a usability issue... ;)

> ...
> By the way: What about "cups-config --version"?

Only available if the user has installed the corresponding
-devel package (at least on Linux)

>>     3. It requires each vendor to develop their own setup
>>        applications,
> 
> Yes, this is a crucial point of the idea.
> But I didn't mean a big-and-fat arbitrary-printer setup application.
> I have something like a bash-script in mind.
> Only the manufacturer knows what exactly he needs to set up
> his one particular printer model.
> With this knowledge he can make a setup script which tests all
> what is needed and therefoere which will not show any user dialog
> except for fatal error messages after which the tool must exit.
> Then only a very generic message-popup with an [ok] button
> (e.g. "xmessage" if X is running) is sufficient.

A script would be good, but I'd still like to give the manufacturers
something standard to work with (e.g. template or script that can
adapt based on files/configuration info) to make is easier and less
error prone.

Also, if we provide the vendors with shell scripts, then we can make
sure the scripts are portable and run on as many distributions or
operating systems as possible.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com
_______________________________________________
Desktop_printing mailing list
Desktop_printing at lists.osdl.org
https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_printing

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/printing-summit/attachments/20060403/8855ceb7/attachment.htm


More information about the Printing-summit mailing list