Re: Printing and the XO
> > Which teachers or schools have been asking for printing support? A few years ago I went to a tech for education conference in Portland Oregon. The teachers at that conference only wanted programs that had the ability to print out student work. Printing is necessary for the public display of student work. This is necessary when you want a record of what the student has done as well as when you want to show others what the student has done. At that time students worked on lab computers so a method of taking examples of student work home was needed. Also it was a way of building a portfolio to justify the use of computers in the classroom. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: Printing and the XO
On Thu, 3 Jan 2008, Greg Smith (gregmsmi) wrote: > Which teachers or schools have been asking for printing support? If we > can add some documentation on that to the Wiki it will help a lot. for some schools (like Birmingham, Alabama) they won't ask for printing support becous ethey won't imagine a computer system being setup that doesn't include it. > It makes sense that schools would want printing and CUPS is a robust > tool in my experience. CUPS may be robust, but it may al ba sledgehammer being used to swat a fly (see my other e-mail on the subject for more of my thoughts on the matter) > Real world user cases will help determine how much effort is needed on > the configuration/moderation fronts. They can also help validate if > copying files to a USB drive is a viable alternative. it would be better to force kids to use the journal and drag documents to the server (or to the printer) and have them copied to the server and then use something on the server to print the document than it would be to force sneakernet to be used for printing David Lang > My guess is schools want a printer if they can afford one. Let us know > what feedback shows it's a priority for existing XO deployments and > let's find out what printers they have and how they want to use them. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Printing and the XO
We didn't talk about which specific teachers or schools requested printing. JG or Walter would know, thats where that information came from. That *any* want printing makes it compelling enough. Greg Smith (gregmsmi) wrote: > Hi Peter, > > Which teachers or schools have been asking for printing support? If we > can add some documentation on that to the Wiki it will help a lot. > > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: Printing and the XO
Hi Peter, Which teachers or schools have been asking for printing support? If we can add some documentation on that to the Wiki it will help a lot. It makes sense that schools would want printing and CUPS is a robust tool in my experience. Real world user cases will help determine how much effort is needed on the configuration/moderation fronts. They can also help validate if copying files to a USB drive is a viable alternative. My guess is schools want a printer if they can afford one. Let us know what feedback shows it's a priority for existing XO deployments and let's find out what printers they have and how they want to use them. Thanks, Greg Smith *** > I started a page in the wiki: > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_CUPS > > Walter On Jan 3, 2008 12:49 AM, Bernardo Innocenti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Peter Krenesky wrote: > > > While not a primary concern of the project, printing is something that > > teachers are asking for. > > [...] > > Is this nice documentation already in the wiki? If not, > please be bold and create a new page! > > -- > \___/ > |___| Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ > \___\ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/ > > ___ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Printing and the XO
apologies for not maintaining threading, but I've just subscribed on Wed Jan 2 16:43:39 EST 2008 Peter Krenesky said: > Configuration - XO >The number of printers, the models, and their locations will be >unknown. It may be 1 printer per school, or many depending on the >country or region. > >Adding or selecting a printer needs to be simple. Autoconfiguration is >the best case scenario but some manual configuration is still needed. A >GUI is required for all of this. > >The presence service may be a way to discover printers and configuration >information. IE. the advertisement includes the configuration to be >added to /etc/cups/printers.conf A printer would really only be >configured, once, at the server. > >Some unanswered questions are: >* What does this GUI look like. >* Where is it located within sugar. Within the configure activity? in the past when I have needed to support printing from many machines and have not wanted to have to change them all when swapping out a printer for a different model I have had very good success with the approach of just telling all the machines that they have a postscript printer and let the server do all the printer-specific conversions. if you really wanted to get fancy, let the server accept HTML as well as postscript to avoid the work on the laptop to convert things (although I suspect that the conversion of HTML to postscript is trivial enough to not be a big deal anyway) this would be the first piece, because you really don't want to have to touch every laptop when you swap out one printer for another one. at this point the remaining problem becomes picking which printer to use. For this you can get a _lot_ of mileage out of simply defining a default print queue (lp or printer, just pick something) and have the laptops use that queue on the school server they are registered to by default. after that a simple dialog that lets you pick a different queue or a different server will cover almost everything else. as for CUPS, I understand that it's the current fad for printing, but I question if it's the right thing to use for resource constrained machines like the XO. CUPS wants to have each machine load the printer driver and do the rendering for the printer before sending it to the server. the servers are almost certainly going to have more resources available then the laptops, and so there's a good argument to be made that the laptops should just send the unconverted print image to the server and let the server render it for whatever printer is attached. the drawback to taking this approach is that it is harder to take advantage of all the features of the printer (paper sizes, trays, staplers, hole punches, etc), but while corporate users will miss these features, the vast majority of printers don't have such features and most people really don't care about them (they just want the image to show up on paper). the one feature that is worth going to some effort to produce is a way to print double-sided if the printer supports it, but it should be possible to do this in a way that won't interfere with normal printing. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Printing and the XO
I started a page in the wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_CUPS -walter On Jan 3, 2008 12:49 AM, Bernardo Innocenti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Peter Krenesky wrote: > > > While not a primary concern of the project, printing is something that > > teachers are asking for. > > [...] > > Is this nice documentation already in the wiki? If not, > please be bold and create a new page! > > -- > \___/ > |___| Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ > \___\ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/ > > ___ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Printing and the XO
Peter Krenesky wrote: > While not a primary concern of the project, printing is something that > teachers are asking for. > [...] Is this nice documentation already in the wiki? If not, please be bold and create a new page! -- \___/ |___| Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ \___\ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Printing and the XO
Hi all, While not a primary concern of the project, printing is something that teachers are asking for. OSL & HP are exploring how all the pieces will fit together. Much of this was discussed in a recent call with Walter Bender, Jim Gettys, Jim Rowson (HP), North Krimsly (OSL), Carlos Jensen (OSU Engineering), and myself. I'm bringing this to the mail list so other people can give input. There were a lot of details discussed so in an effort to be concise this will be more of an outline. There are many pieces to this problem, this description is in no way considered complete. I'm just getting the conversation going. Overview * XO will have CUPS (currently installable by yum) and send print jobs to the school server or another linux desktop. * New GUI on the XO will be added to configure and use printers. * Modifications and or additions to CUPS client might be needed to improve performance, reduce footprint, and or achieve desired functionality. * New GUI for security and other configuration options (queueing, authorization, etc) for cups Configuration - XO The number of printers, the models, and their locations will be unknown. It may be 1 printer per school, or many depending on the country or region. Adding or selecting a printer needs to be simple. Autoconfiguration is the best case scenario but some manual configuration is still needed. A GUI is required for all of this. The presence service may be a way to discover printers and configuration information. IE. the advertisement includes the configuration to be added to /etc/cups/printers.conf A printer would really only be configured, once, at the server. Some unanswered questions are: * What does this GUI look like. * Where is it located within sugar. Within the configure activity? Configuration/Moderation - Server Some form of authorization will be needed to make sure kids only print to their own school, class, etc. Cups already allows for access per user and XOs can be identified by their keys. The printer configuration tool in the current version of Ubuntu has this feature already. Printing supplies are not cheap and may be the biggest obstacle. There is concern that kids will print large jobs and use supplies up quickly. There should be some form of moderation to prevent waste and misuse. Authorization queues and or quotas were suggested. Some of these features exist in CUPS but there is no GUI to expose them. Some possible features for moderation: * configurable quotas. IE. 2 pages per day. 20 pages per month. etc. * override for quota * Authorization queues. Rulesets to determine which jobs requires teacher authorization before printing * previewing jobs in queue * identification of duplicate jobs Activities The first activities that this is a priority for are write and browse but development can be in parallel. These activities are some with the most compelling need for printing. They also are low hanging fruit since both mozilla and abiword already have printing capabilities. Files sent to cups must be postscript or PDF. What is shown on the screen must be translated to one of these formats. Cairo has an API for creating PDFs. Performance Issues We are under the impression that cups includes drivers and or other information for a lot of printers. This creates a large footprint on disk and or in memory. If this is the case then cups should be modified to allow better control of resources that cups uses. Hardware We did not touch on the questions involving printer hardware very much. We were focusing on the software side of things. The consensus from the earlier OSL/HP meetings was that a low cost, rugged, printer that can use cheap ink would be a great thing. Hardware is not something the OSL has expertise in creating but perhaps HP labs or OLPC could handle it. Testing CUPS I verified that cups was installable and works on the XO over a traditional wireless network with the following steps (1-3 require root) 1) yum install cups.i386 2) configure your printer in /etc/cups/printers.conf 3) /etc/init.d/cups restart 4) lpr -P fooprinter foodoc.ps - Peter --- Peter Krenesky Open Source Lab Oregon State University ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
