Examination of a Linux Gui, w/color commentary

[Mark Komarinski]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 08:04:30AM -0500, Michael ODonnell wrote:
> 
> 
> > In an Ironic side twist, coincidental to one of the recently
> > active threads in gnhlug-discuss, ESR is examining the issues he
> > encountered whilst attempting to configure a printer using the
> > CUPS GUI config tool.
> 
> Wow, thanks for that one - now I don't feel so bad.
> Having gone through a similar wrestling match with CUPS a few
> months ago I am sorry to say that I share ESR's opinion to a
> large extent.  And it ain't that I'm particularly clueless
> about computers (hell, in the end I wound up submitting
> a patch for the daemon code to fix a situation where you
> could force a SIGSEGV in one place and an endless loop in
> another by simply including tildes in the URIs mentioned in
> the cupsd config file, but that's another story) but in my
> situation configuring CUPS was definitely harder and less
> obvious than it should have been.
 
In my experience, it's not obvious, but it's not hard.  The CLI
is a pain to work with.  The Red Hat GUI isn't that useful either.
The trick is to make sure you have all the print drivers installed
and a good knowledge of the web interface.  I prefer using CUPS
where I can.

> Of course, I've also had a number of encounters with
> Microsoft products that left me foaming at the mouth, and
> in those cases I didn't have source code available when
> all else failed...

One of my books had entire chapers on using CUPS including some of the
more advanced topics (encryption and authentication).  Even though I
wrote it years ago, I'm pretty sure it's still good.

If there's enough interest, maybe I can drag my laptop and a printer
to the next meeting and go through some of it.  If someone else brings
a wireless-enabled laptop, maybe we can test printing via network.

-Mark
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