Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
One point of clarification. CUPS was NOT developed by Apple, they bought it. I used to talk to the guy who actually created it many YEARS ago as free software. He then commercialized it some, then eventually sold it off. I guess Apple owns the rights to it now.
Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
On 07/28/2011 06:32 AM, Brent L. Bates wrote: One point of clarification. CUPS was NOT developed by Apple, they bought it. I used to talk to the guy who actually created it many YEARS ago as free software. He then commercialized it some, then eventually sold it off. I guess Apple owns the rights to it now. My understanding is that you are correct, and that CUPS evolved from earlier lp driver databases -- implementationally and somewhat conceptually different from predecessors, but following a path that had been forged. As a further aside, I for one do not care who is funding an open systems source-available project -- CUPS nominally is a .org , not a .com or .biz . It is obvious from the responses that Fermilab does not have the dedicated staffing to provide such a capability for hard drive parameter data -- does CERN? Does any other more-or-less public entity anywhere in the world? Would a for-profit entity step up to the plate, as Apple did with CUPS or Sun (now Oracle) did with OpenOffice (Sun bought StarOffice that became OpenOffice)? Yasha Karant
Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
I have found that modern CUPS printer support configuration tools under EL have a fairly complete data base of the drivers/parameters needed for vendor specific printers. To some extent, this seems to include even reverse engineered data for printers for which the vendor will not provide any detailed public specifications and only provides proprietary drivers to the monopoly (and sometimes, Apple). Given various comments and suggestions that have appeared concerning the proper Linux formatting/partitioning and use of some current SATA hard drives that no longer present the 512 byte standard to the operating system, could SL (or RH or something equivalent to the CUPS team or ...) provide a data base for drives similar to the CUPS one for printers? For example, during the initial installation of either a new drive or a new major release of the OS (e.g., going from EL 5 to EL 6), the drive partitioning/formatting utility would recognize the drive(s) in use and automatically set either acceptable or optimal parameters. If such a data base exists, relevant URLs and/or RPMs would be appreciated. Yasha Karant
Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
On 11-07-27 10:25 AM, Yasha Karant wrote: I have found that modern CUPS printer support configuration tools under EL have a fairly complete data base of the drivers/parameters needed for vendor specific printers. To some extent, this seems to include even reverse engineered data for printers for which the vendor will not provide any detailed public specifications and only provides proprietary drivers to the monopoly (and sometimes, Apple). Given various comments and suggestions that have appeared concerning the proper Linux formatting/partitioning and use of some current SATA hard drives that no longer present the 512 byte standard to the operating system, could SL (or RH or something equivalent to the CUPS team or ...) provide a data base for drives similar to the CUPS one for printers? For example, during the initial installation of either a new drive or a new major release of the OS (e.g., going from EL 5 to EL 6), the drive partitioning/formatting utility would recognize the drive(s) in use and automatically set either acceptable or optimal parameters. If such a data base exists, relevant URLs and/or RPMs would be appreciated. Yasha Karant This may be a suggestion that would be more pertinent to the upstream vendor, as I understand it SL doesn't actually do any development to modify or add to the EL base upon which SL is built. :) If it's already been done, I haven't heard about it - that's not to say it doesn't exist though ;) -Chris
Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
On Wednesday, July 27, 2011 01:25:43 PM you wrote: I have found that modern CUPS printer support configuration tools under EL have a fairly complete data base of the drivers/parameters needed for vendor specific printers. To some extent, this seems to include even reverse engineered data for printers for which the vendor will not provide any detailed public specifications and only provides proprietary drivers to the monopoly (and sometimes, Apple). You do realize that Apple is the primary developer of CUPS, right? And that CUPS is the Mac OS X printing backend, right? There's a good reason CUPS has such broad support.
Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
On 11-07-27 12:01 PM, Yasha Karant wrote: On 07/27/2011 11:46 AM, Chris Tooley wrote: On 11-07-27 10:25 AM, Yasha Karant wrote: I have found that modern CUPS printer support configuration tools under EL have a fairly complete data base of the drivers/parameters needed for vendor specific printers. To some extent, this seems to include even reverse engineered data for printers for which the vendor will not provide any detailed public specifications and only provides proprietary drivers to the monopoly (and sometimes, Apple). Given various comments and suggestions that have appeared concerning the proper Linux formatting/partitioning and use of some current SATA hard drives that no longer present the 512 byte standard to the operating system, could SL (or RH or something equivalent to the CUPS team or ...) provide a data base for drives similar to the CUPS one for printers? For example, during the initial installation of either a new drive or a new major release of the OS (e.g., going from EL 5 to EL 6), the drive partitioning/formatting utility would recognize the drive(s) in use and automatically set either acceptable or optimal parameters. If such a data base exists, relevant URLs and/or RPMs would be appreciated. Yasha Karant This may be a suggestion that would be more pertinent to the upstream vendor, as I understand it SL doesn't actually do any development to modify or add to the EL base upon which SL is built. :) If it's already been done, I haven't heard about it - that's not to say it doesn't exist though ;) -Chris My understanding is that CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems quoted from http://www.cups.org/ . Thus, CUPS is from a .org, not from a vendor, or even an academic/government entity such as Fermilab or CERN. Hence, although SL and even RH would not the establishing body, it is appropriate for SL, not just RH, to spearhead such an initiative for another appropriate .org entity . If Fermilab/CERN have sufficient resources, they could develop such a data base for use with gparted or other open source non-volatile storage (e.g., disk) subsystems. Yasha True, however, Redhat has more resources with regards to development of new software (people who are extremely familiar with linux architecture, at least) than SL. I'm not trying to say that you *shouldn't* suggest this stuff to the SL list, just that it would be more *likely* to get implemented if suggested to RH - or perhaps even a large server HDD vendor such as Seagate(unlikely) or Intel(SSDs, right? Also they do a lot of work in the kernel). Not to mention that the rate of uptake in the rest of the Linux community would be greater if supported by a larger vendor. As I understand SL's structure, they have about 3 people who are dedicated to implementing a RH-branding free EL for the scientific community so they reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and have a common install base for the various experimenters. If there are people developing for SL - it's most likely for software to do with scientific applications which run *on* SL - for instance, ROOT. I think it's out of scope for the SL maintainers to spearhead a software initiative... My interpretation could be wrong though, anyone from SL care to correct me on that? However, I do think it would be a good idea to have some sort of database that would allow optimization of file systems on specific HDDs. But then again, I've been quite happy just using the default HDD formatting options from SL when I install - so far I've not had any problems. -Chris
Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
On 07/27/2011 09:32 PM, Chris Tooley wrote: On 11-07-27 12:01 PM, Yasha Karant wrote: On 07/27/2011 11:46 AM, Chris Tooley wrote: On 11-07-27 10:25 AM, Yasha Karant wrote: I have found that modern CUPS printer support configuration tools under EL have a fairly complete data base of the drivers/parameters needed for vendor specific printers. To some extent, this seems to include even reverse engineered data for printers for which the vendor will not provide any detailed public specifications and only provides proprietary drivers to the monopoly (and sometimes, Apple). Given various comments and suggestions that have appeared concerning the proper Linux formatting/partitioning and use of some current SATA hard drives that no longer present the 512 byte standard to the operating system, could SL (or RH or something equivalent to the CUPS team or ...) provide a data base for drives similar to the CUPS one for printers? For example, during the initial installation of either a new drive or a new major release of the OS (e.g., going from EL 5 to EL 6), the drive partitioning/formatting utility would recognize the drive(s) in use and automatically set either acceptable or optimal parameters. If such a data base exists, relevant URLs and/or RPMs would be appreciated. Yasha Karant This may be a suggestion that would be more pertinent to the upstream vendor, as I understand it SL doesn't actually do any development to modify or add to the EL base upon which SL is built. :) If it's already been done, I haven't heard about it - that's not to say it doesn't exist though ;) -Chris My understanding is that CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems quoted from http://www.cups.org/ . Thus, CUPS is from a .org, not from a vendor, or even an academic/government entity such as Fermilab or CERN. Hence, although SL and even RH would not the establishing body, it is appropriate for SL, not just RH, to spearhead such an initiative for another appropriate .org entity . If Fermilab/CERN have sufficient resources, they could develop such a data base for use with gparted or other open source non-volatile storage (e.g., disk) subsystems. Yasha True, however, Redhat has more resources with regards to development of new software (people who are extremely familiar with linux architecture, at least) than SL. I'm not trying to say that you *shouldn't* suggest this stuff to the SL list, just that it would be more *likely* to get implemented if suggested to RH - or perhaps even a large server HDD vendor such as Seagate(unlikely) or Intel(SSDs, right? Also they do a lot of work in the kernel). Not to mention that the rate of uptake in the rest of the Linux community would be greater if supported by a larger vendor. As I understand SL's structure, they have about 3 people who are dedicated to implementing a RH-branding free EL for the scientific community so they reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and have a common install base for the various experimenters. If there are people developing for SL - it's most likely for software to do with scientific applications which run *on* SL - for instance, ROOT. I think it's out of scope for the SL maintainers to spearhead a software initiative... My interpretation could be wrong though, anyone from SL care to correct me on that? You are absolutely right. Urs
Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
The smartmontools project maintains a database of drives (mostly for SMART reporting purposes); you might ask them if they'd extend their database to handle this information. On 27 Jul 2011, at 1225, Yasha Karant wrote: I have found that modern CUPS printer support configuration tools under EL have a fairly complete data base of the drivers/parameters needed for vendor specific printers. To some extent, this seems to include even reverse engineered data for printers for which the vendor will not provide any detailed public specifications and only provides proprietary drivers to the monopoly (and sometimes, Apple). Given various comments and suggestions that have appeared concerning the proper Linux formatting/partitioning and use of some current SATA hard drives that no longer present the 512 byte standard to the operating system, could SL (or RH or something equivalent to the CUPS team or ...) provide a data base for drives similar to the CUPS one for printers? For example, during the initial installation of either a new drive or a new major release of the OS (e.g., going from EL 5 to EL 6), the drive partitioning/formatting utility would recognize the drive(s) in use and automatically set either acceptable or optimal parameters. If such a data base exists, relevant URLs and/or RPMs would be appreciated. Yasha Karant
Re: Suggestion for a hard drive CUPS-like data base
On Wednesday, July 27, 2011 03:01:58 PM you wrote: My understanding is that CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems quoted from http://www.cups.org/ . Thus, CUPS is from a .org, not from a vendor, or even an academic/government entity such as Fermilab or CERN. What part of 'developed by Apple' is unclear? If you feel the itch to have a hard drive database, go for it. But the question of whether it's appropriate for SL is up the the SL developers to answer, and no one else.
