CentraLUG meeting summary

[Christopher Schmidt]

Earlier this evening was the CentraLUG meeting at NHTI in Concord. 
Approximately 15 people showed up, many of whom also attended the Python 
meeting beforehand. I had my laptop open, and took some notes on 
discussions and the presentation, which was on how to set up a CUPS 
server. 

The original copy of the notes I took via IRC was transferred via a bot 
written in Python to a web interface, also written in Python[0]. These 
notes are available noets/66 [1], a summary of which I will attempt to 
condense here:

The meeting was mostly discussing CUPS. There were a number of things 
which were discussed, most of which were basic setup: how to uncomment 
the lines that will let your cups daemon start. Additionally, some 
discussion was had over the way that clients versus servers work, what 
you need to run in order to use CUPS, and where print "drivers" come 
from. (Drivers in the CUPS world are slightly different: they are 
actually filters which change from postscript format to a 
printer-specific format for printing.) Of note are the foomatic, 
gimp-print, and hpijs packages, which typically allow you to access all 
the settings of the printer once you install them. (Basic CUPS has 
relatively limited driver support in comparison.)

The CUPS client daemon by default runs a web interface on localhost, 
port 631. From here you can login using HTTP authentication: the default 
is to allow access as the root system user and password, after which you 
can configure and admin printers. There are a number of relatively 
complex server-side settings, however, most of these are not needed for 
the simple case of printing. (When it works, It Just Works(tm), when it 
doesn't, give up. ;))

IPP is the protocol that CUPS uses: broadcast messages are sent out over 
the local network advertising the printers, which the CUPS client will 
listen for, and add the printers. This works under both the *nix and 
Apple platforms. For Windows clients, configuration is through Samba: 
simply turn on Samba sharing of printers, and you should be able to add 
a network printer via the typical windows interfaces.

There was some discussion of the various levels of authentication, and 
how to set it up so that a different user than root can admin the web 
interface, however, no clear resolution was reached.

Bill then demonstrated a program called xpp[2], which allows for GUI 
configuration of a number of settings like you would typically find in 
the Windows or Mac print settings window: paper size, quality, etc. If 
you require more than simple printing options, this may be the best bet 
for you, especially if you want to regularly change quality settings or 
something of the like.

After this, a user brought in a Laserjet printer with a parrellel port 
to ethernet dongle: this device was set up to print from CUPS via the 
web interface, and clients were able to print a test page to it without 
any problems.

The discussion then evolved into discussion of converting from Microsoft 
formats such as Word Docs or Excel to a more usable format. For Word 
documents, antiword[3] was mentioned, which does a pretty decent job of 
taking MS Word and spitting out plain text, with some formatting 
maintained. For converting Excel spreadsheets, there is xlhtml[4], which 
will spit out some HTML given an excel spreadsheet. It appears to no 
longer be under development, but it is at least a starting place for 
those of you who may need to deal with such a format.

Thanks to our presenter (whose name I didn't catch), for NHTI for 
hosting us, and for all those who showed up, I enjoyed it and hope to 
see you all at the next one.

[0] http://crschmidt.net/noets/0
[1] http://crschmidt.net/noets/66
[2] http://cups.sourceforge.net/xpp/
[3] http://www.winfield.demon.nl
[4] http://chicago.sourceforge.net/xlhtml/

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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