Results tagged “foo2zjs” from CLICK

It's been a year and a half since I started using Linux (or GNU/Linux, if you prefer) for much of my day-to-day computing, but the past week or so marks the first time I've had to support another user -- in this case my wife, Ilene, whose Macintosh iBook G4 is awaiting the end of the semester at California State University Northridge, where she teaches.

Coincidentally, that semester ends today. Soon I will try to image the iBook's drive to a Firewire-connected external hard drive (picked up for $99 at Fry's) and then have her boot from that drive until I can a) get a new laptop hard-drive to replace the currently dying one, and b) go through the arduous process of removing and replacing the internal drive (thanks to ifixit.com for the instructions on the procedure.

But back to Linux and supporting a new user.

It has been a lot harder than I thought. We don't think like our users. But we need to learn.

Ilene does things differently that I do, and as the person doing the installation and support, I needed to recognize that and tune the system accordingly.

I started with Ubuntu 8.04. That worked well enough, except I couldn't get the HP Laserjet 1020 USB printer to work, and I couldn't manage to get USB flash drives mounted.

I also didn't have a lot of time with the machine.

I quickly switched over to Debian Lenny, the other OS on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450 that I got for free and resurrected from the premature death it suffered due to a busted power plug). With Lenny, we can now use USB flash drives, except that to write to the drive, the current user has to be the person to plug the drive in. If I plug it in and log out, Ilene can't sign in and write to the drive. So between logins, the drive needs to be pulled in order to get the permissions right. Before that, I added Ilene to the disk, plugdev and floppy groups. I don't know if that helped or did nothing, but since I saw that sda1, the flash drive was owned by the floppy group, I added her to that last.

I haven't checked if a full reboot allows Ilene to sign in and have write permission to the flash drive without re-plugging it, but I'll try that soon.

So we had the flash drive -- which had all her essential files from the Mac -- working fine.

Ilene was as amused as she should be (i.e. very) at Firefox being renamed Iceweasel. She had no problem using OpenOffice Writer and Calc, and she's eager to test Impress (she uses PowerPoint quite a bit for her classes).

I don't know how she stumbled upon AbiWord (probably because it's the first app with the words "word processor" in the menu), but she used it to write a bit and liked it, except for the small size of the type. I will soon tell her that OpenOffice Writer might be a better choice when it comes to formatting documents that will look better when she returns to her Mac and MS Word.

She liked Pidgin a lot. The open-source instant-messaging app enabled her to use her Yahoo! Messenger account for IMing, and it also notified her about new e-mail coming in to her Yahoo! Mail account.

Pidgin works very well. I use it in Windows, too, where it keeps track of my Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and AIM accounts.

Two things Ilene needed were the ability to print to PDF from any application (Macs do that) and print ... to an actual printer. Ubuntu, I think, ships with PDF capability (though don't quote me), but in Debian, you have to add the cups-pdf package, which I did through Synaptic. Then I added the PDF printer with the GNOME printer utility and made it the default.

But I still had one hope for getting printing with the HP Laserjet 1020 working. In both Ubuntu and Debian, the systems had no problem finding the USB printer, they just wouldn't print.

In one of my recent entries, reader Natxo Asenjo pointed me to the foo2zjs project, which offers a different Linux driver for the HP LaserJet 1020 and quite a few other printers. There are even detailed instructions for most of the major distros.

I downloaded, unpacked and installed the files, then added the printer via CUPS. I don't know if it was the driver itself or this instruction that did it:

# make install install-hotplug cups

... but I finally got my HP printer to work in Linux.

Again, this shouldn't have been so hard. The utilities in Debian and Ubuntu, or the CUPS interface itself, should have properly configured this USB printer.

Why have I never run into this problem before? Because I only use networked printers at the office, and this is the first time I've tried to print via USB. I thought it would be easier. Much easier.

At any rate, I have this fine project to thank for helping me with this problem. They accept donations, and I was happy to give one.

So now I have a fully working system here for Ilene, myself and the 4-year-old.

And with the semester ending today, it's just about time to get to work on the iBook's ailing disk drive.

But Linux will have at least a few more days as this home's primary desktop.

And I've learned quite a bit about what "normal" people (i.e. not Linux geeks) need when they make the move from the proprietary OS they know to the FOSS OS they don't.

One last thing: I began this installation with Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted as easy a transition for Ilene as possible, and I thought that Ubuntu provided that. It also had suspend/resume, which I wanted to have, since the laptop would be on for most of the day.

First off, suspend/resume works way better on the Mac, where you hit the space bar to bring the computer back. On the Gateway, you hit the power button, and the whole thing takes quite a bit longer.

Secondly, while Debian is a bit more "locked down" than Ubuntu (and I wanted to do as little manual "unlocking" as possible), I had limited time in which to get the installation working as well as possible, and that pushed Debian Lenny over the top. If the USB flash drive had worked immediately in Ubuntu, and had I figured out the printing problem (which spans all Linux distros), I would've stuck with the new 8.04 LTS.

But since things came together just that much quicker in Debian, that's what we went with. Ilene even told me that once she got started in Debian, she wanted to stick with it. It's just too jarring to continually switch distros (although many of us do it all the time because we've got other problems ... and I think you know what I'm talking about).

Final words: I know that the Gateway is a bit more than five years old, and the HP Laserjet 1020 is at least three years old. But a big-time Linux distribution like Ubuntu -- which has positioned itself as the distro for the rest of us -- shouldn't install without the ability to immediately read and write to USB flash media and should be able to print without resorting to a third-party driver project. Debian did the flash drives well but also couldn't output to this printer. In the case of the printing, I lay the blame on CUPS and not the individual distros.

But we're at the point where more things need to work out of the box for more people, more of the time (feel free to replace "more" with "most").

I still recommend Ubuntu to new users, especially because most of the third-party how-to books out there focus on it, and I wouldn't cast a new user adrift without a hefty book that might at least answer some of their questions.

And it's not like Windows and Mac users don't have their share of driver problems. I remember this very HP printer being somewhat of a pain to get working in OS X, too (I had to download a driver from HP ... for a different printer), but Linux had to be better. It already is, in may respects, and I think we're almost there. The key word is "almost."

I won't hesitate to set up others with Linux, but I know that supporting any OS -- be it Windows, OS X or Linux -- for someone else can entail quite a bit of work.

And I did enjoy seeing Ilene gets some hands-on time with Linux.

(Begin cliche mode)

From a cost, functionality and non-thievary perspective, open-source software isn't just the best game in town, it's the only game.

(End cliche mode)