A commenter (Kerberos) gave me a link regarding a FLOSS evangelist having trouble to connect to a CUPS printer in Linux. That link was from 2004, and he claimed that it was still relevant.

Naturally I wanted to see what he was on about, and decided to connect to a CUPS printer already set up here at the office.

Here is what happened…Connecting to a CUPS Printer

Apparently back in 2004 connecting to a CUPS printer was a bit of a nightmare. I have discovered two things, one good, one bad. Let us deal with the good part first, connecting to the printer.

1. Connect to the network the printer is shared on.
2. Click on System > Administration > Printing. The printer dialog box will pop up.
3. Click on Server > Settings and in there tick “Show Printers Shared by other systems”
   

   Telling CUPS where to look.

4. Click OK, and when in the printer dialog your CUPS printers will appear!
   

   The CUPS printers appear at the bottom.

Very easy. Other printers that I have added are also in the Printers dialog box, USB printers are basically plug and play.

Now for the BAD

It is not as intuitive as I would like. Sure it is very easy to connect to the CUPS printer, and to most USB printers in Ubuntu. Read this entry on my take on printers and PC’s in general. Read it before you respond by flaming me for being a Linux evangelist.

Summary

Taking a read through this blog that Kerberos referred me to, I saw this beauty of a quote:

It’s easy to ridicule the estimated 2006-or-2007 ship date for Longhorn, the next major release of Windows. But do you doubt for a moment that Longhorn will provide more improvements from Windows XP than desktop Linux will gain during the same period?

We all know what Longhorn turned out to be huh? Vista. And what became of Vista? It is a subject of derision amongst all who use it, or have to support it. Win7 is a great improvement, and is what Longhorn should have been.

Back to the UI part of this entry – a criticism of how Ubuntu approaches it, and praise for how KDE approaches it.

Ubuntu is basically devoid of little pop-up messages that point the user in the right direction – this must change. Soon! KDE has helpful little pop-up messages that appear whenever you hover over most click-able menus and buttons. The user is subject to much more hand holding, and this is a good thing for new users.

Will Gnome-Shell deliver in this manner? It hasn’t yet. I hope it will, but I have not seen any indication that this will be the case.

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