I am sitting at a lounge in Detroit waiting for my flight to Argentina for Debconf. They have a printer available, an hp2010 and I wanted another copy of my itinerary.
The guy in front of me is plugged in and got the CD of drivers from the front desk and was wrestling with this thing for like 15 minutes. I finally decided to help the poor guy print his dreaded spreadsheet of what seemed like lots of work for the guy.
He went on his way and I plugged in the usb cable. Getting ready to go into the menu to configure the thing a notification thinger pops up and told me the printer was ready. It didn’t even ask me a question. NOT A THING.
In fact, I thought it was lying to me. The actual thought of "That can’t be right" went through my head. I went into the printer configuration … and there it was … hp2010. I clicked print, and it worked.
Things learned here:
- Seemingly impossible things a few years ago seem so trivial now … like say … printing in Linux.
- … or it could be that printing will always be the last impossible problem in computer science and I got lucky this time. It’s up there with an accurate progress meter and quantum computing with ponies.
- Shout out to the linuxprinting.org people and others for this painless print job. Thanks!
I went to return the cable to the front desk and the lady asked, "Did it work for you?, The person before you had all these problems."
"Nope, out-of-the-box …."
In hindsight I should have said something more badass like … "Nope, I roll with Till Kamppeter …"; but I always come up short… it’s days like this when I miss my computer asking me if I want to manage my fonts with defoma. (Not Really) ….
CUPS autoconfigure definitely came a long way with Ubuntu in the last couple releases. I’ll never forget the first time I plugged my DeskJet 932C into my laptop and Ubuntu had the printer configured before I could even look up from the port and to the screen.
HP has good printer support and CUPS is pretty robust, so printing is usually pretty happy for me (although I need to look into a dithering issue with the latest release…) Isn’t it a satisfying feeling when you’re on the road and you know Ubuntu has you covered?
The exact same thing happened when I got my HP printer. It configured itself a for a second I didn’t believe it. I then failed to realize that this was a hint at how easy sharing it would be. I delayed sharing the printer because I remember configuring samba/cups before, so I put it off till the weekend. Below is a how-to on sharing a pritner between two Ubuntu computers:
1. click “Share published printers connected to this system” in the
2. click “Show printers shared by other systems” on the other computer
3. print something!
“”Did it work for you?, The person before you had all these problems.”
“Nope, out-of-the-box ….”"
Shouldn’t it be “Yep, out-of-the-box”
I bought an HP printer months ago (a gift for my girlfriend). I tried to install it to a machine that dual-boots both windows and Ubuntu.
Windows:
1- insert the CD;
2- accept to install a ton and half of software;
3- answer a couple of useless questions;
4- plug-in the USB cable;
5- the installation program freezes;
6- the whole OS freezes;
7- reboot;
8- insert the CD again: “the driver has been installed, installation aborted”.
9- remove the software and try again…
Ubuntu:
1- plug-in the USB cable;
2- done!
Vadim P. you are right, in my haste to post how awesome this was I failed to paraphrase myself correctly. Heh.
That’s indeed how it should always work for all hardware. HP has gotten pretty good, it’s shame that couple other big vendors are lagging seriously behind.
I love the way Edubuntu works when configuring the printers. Where I usually am, there are some Old HP Laserjet 4 printers. They don’t auto configure, as they are shared over the network, but the Wizard to configure them is so quick and easy. It seems that Linux has gotten good at domains and things too!
To think that when I started out with GNU/Linux (on release of Fedora Core 1), CUPS was often referenced with “Can’t Usually Print Stuff”
I remember this too, just a few releases of Ubuntu ago I couldn’t get my Epson C45 to work, and then with 7.04 I just had to plug it in. If my eyes could have popped out, they would have. I disbelievingly printed a test page only to see that work just fine. This stuff has really come a long way.
My mom just bought a new printer. I told her to go for an HP since I know they work great in Linux. I also knew lots of autoconfig work had been done in Hardy, so I waited til after I did the nice fresh install of 8.04.1 to plug it in, and, like you, felt the need to verify that it actually really did set it up without asking any questions. Wow, this is great. I told my mom that I wanted to do the new system before installing the printer because I’d heard it was easier now, but instant? Wasn’t expecting that at all.