I love it when things Just Work

• November 12, 2007
• Linux  
• OSS  

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!