I am currently in the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower hotel, and since I fly entirely too much, I got upgraded into a room which contains a printer. Thinking that I would try using it, I hooked it up to my laptop (running Ubuntu Gutsy), selected System->Administration->Printing on the desktop, and then clicked on New Printer. To my astonishment, when the dialog box came up, the system had already autodetected the fact that I had an HP OfficeJet KX60xi printer connected to the parallel port, had recommended which driver I should use, and a few “next” and “continue” clicks later, the printer was installed, and 15 seconds later I was able to print to it.
Users of MacOS systems are probably used to such things, but this was faster and easier than what Windows asks of users who want to install a new printer. Coming from a Unix background, I would have been quite pleased if I was able to set up the printer after manually select the printer type and driver from a dialog box. Simply not having to su to root, edit some config files, and then restart some daemons, would be a major advance. But this completely exceeded my expectations. Well done to everyone in the CUPS and GNOME community who worked to make this possible!
Related posts (automatically generated):
- Why do I hate Microsoft? Let me count the ways…. For various reasons, I’ve had to deal with a large number of Microsoft systems (and Microsoft problems) a lot recently....
- Tip ‘o the hat, wag o’ the finger — Linux power savings for laptop users It’s interesting to see how far, and yet how much more work we need to do on power management for...
- Why I purchased the Sony PRS-505 Reader Although I lot of people have been lauding the Kindle, I recently decided to go with the Sony PRS-505 instead....
- Hans Reiser, 20/20, and his talk at Google I got a call from one of the researchers from ABC news this evening. Apparently they are planning on doing...
- The simple things that make a geek happy…. Whee! A quick ten minute hack involving some left-over X-10 hardware, “apt-get install heyu”, a quick edit of a configuration...
November 12th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
[...] I love it when things Just Work “To my astonishment [the printer was autodetected] and 15 seconds later I was able to print to it. Well done to everyone in the CUPS and GNOME community who worked to make this possible!” — Ted T’so loves “Just Works” (tags: gnome cups printing justworks tedtso) [...]
November 12th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I noticed your post through Jeff’s blog and I’d like to cheer up more people. I’m on Ubuntu Hardy Heron and yesterday I tried to plug in some random USB printer whose brand and model I don’t rememer. The printer was automatically detected, configured and ready to print: I did not even sart the system-config-printer utility. It just worked.
Now that is a relief.
November 12th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
[...] I love it when things Just Work “To my astonishment [the printer was autodetected] and 15 seconds later I was able to print to it. Well done to everyone in the CUPS and GNOME community who worked to make this possible!” — Ted T’so loves “Just Works” (tags: gnome cups printing justworks tedtso) Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
November 12th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Would that the wireless worked so weel.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
The distribution you should be thanking is Fedora Project which created system-config-printer that Ubuntu is using now.
November 13th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I autodetect and configure functionally was developed by the Fedora Project. I think that Tim Waugh of Red Hat was the guy behind it. Why are you thanking the CUPS and GNOME guys?
November 13th, 2007 at 3:15 am
You’re right, the panel in question was system-config-printer.py, and it appears to have been written by Tim Waugh and florian Festi. So the Kudo’s should go to Red Hat. My bad; I should have checked more carefully to give credit where credit was due.