On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, Martin Langhoff wrote: > Printing will probably be handled via cups. We are missing a lot of > infrastructure there (automagic configuration, quota mgmt, some admin > tools, ui), and it does make sense to start building it. Just not > using platform-specific tools - cups can take care of interoperating.
one annoyance I have with CUPS in current distros is that it wants you to install printer drivers for your specific printer on every machine. pre-CUPS what I would do is install the printer driver on the server the printer is attached to and tell all other machines to print in plain postscript to that printer and let the server deal with the translation. with CUPS I seem to have to fight a lot harder to do this. pro: client config is very simple, and I don't have to touch every client if I swap out a printer pro: CPU intensive conversion from postscript to printer-specific language can be done on the (typicaly) more powerful server, rather than the clients. con: you don't get direct access to all the fancy features a printer may have (but I don't think they would be available anyway, given the Sugar emphisis on simplicity) con: it requires postscript support on the server side, which is not available directly on cheap network printers. in the situation of the XO deployments, I really think the simplicity of not needing to deal with printer drivers on each laptop and the ability to move the cpu load to the server when printing should make this strategy very attractive. David Lang _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel