Apple Releases CUPS 2.0 178
kthreadd writes: 15 years after the release of CUPS 1.0, Apple has now released version 2.0 of the printing system for GNU/Linux and other Unix-style operating systems. One of the major new features in 2.0 is that the test program for ippserver now passes the IPP Everywhere self-certification tests. Also, they've made an interesting blog post looking at the past and future of printing. Since the first major release in 1999, printing has become much more personal. Printer drivers are going away, and mobile usage is now the norm."
About time (Score:5, Funny)
Printer drivers are going away
It's about time
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... For any supported printer purchased in 2015+N...
Re: About time (Score:2)
I haven't had to install a printer driver (ie a custom app) for my ios device since AirPrint came out in 2010. The Mac can also work with any AirPrint capable driver. Most wireless printrrs these days support it.
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Of the ~500 million printers in active service today (that's counting all of the printers sold in the last 4 years, since the average service life of a printer is a little over 4 years overall), 96% have one or more network interfaces and 94% support IPP (the holdouts are mainly label printers...)
Most IPP printers support PostScript, PCL, PDF, PWG Raster, or AirPrint, which means you can do a "generic" driver that provides all or most (depending on the printer and language) of the functionality of the vendo
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Seriously.
Now, if only I could believe it. Printer drivers have been going away fro decades now, and yet every year, I feel like the printer drivers become harder to install, less reliable, and more likely to bundle in some crapware to advertise that you can buy more printer ink. But maybe that's just because I'm using Windows...?
The future of printing? (Score:3)
I haven't turned on my printer in 5 years.
The future of printing is that tablets will make it obsolete,
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I can see it coming now: "CUPS 3.0 for tablets"
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I can see it coming now: "CUPS 3.0 for tablets"
In my office nothing is possible without CUPS of COFFEE!
Paperless office? Not in my lifetime (Score:2)
I haven't turned on my printer in 5 years.
You must not work in an office then.
The future of printing is that tablets will make it obsolete,
Not in my lifetime or yours. I'm typing this at a desk that has so much paper on it I can barely see the desktop. Computers did not, do not and will not make paper obsolete. In actual fact computers make it easier than ever to generate vast quantities of printed documents and that is exactly what people do.
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"Not in my lifetime or yours."
Don't jinx it, man.
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I haven't turned on my printer in 5 years.
You must not work in an office then.
Strange enough, I haven't printed anything in the office for ages, but use my printer at home all the time. Well, my wife does mostly :-)
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Offices I have worked in have had very little paper in them over my career (starting just before the Iraq War) but I work in tech so maybe we're on the leading edge. I literally can't think of the last time I had to touch a piece of paper specifically for work -- maybe signing my employment contract? Sometimes I use pen and paper to work out algorithms but more often I use a whiteboard.
What kind of office do you work in? There is a great diversity.
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I recently got an email from my insurance company telling me they needed some additional paperwork. They told me to fax the documents to a phone number.
I thought "Sure, it should be fairly easy to find a fax machine. But... where am I going to find the time machine required to go back to the 1970s to find the fax machine?"
My father-in-law recently commented on me not owning a printer, suggesting maybe he could get us one as a gift. I shut that down: look, I can afford a printer if I want one, but I've lived
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For home, printers are indeed used much less than 10-15 years ago.
Photos can be demonstrated on a tablet or TV, short documents and books can be read on a tablet. Printing emails is no longer the only option of keeping them safe. Maps can be used on a phone instead of being printed.
But if you need a formal or signed document, printers are still heavily used. I don't know how it's in the US, but in some countries you need stuff like
- passport copies for opening bank accounts, car registration, and so on
- off
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Now with the proliferation of mobile screens and projectors this seems to be finally the case. I'm not saying we'
The biggest problem with "paperless" offices (Score:2)
But the problem with the "paperless" office was portability.
That was merely one of many problems and not even close to the biggest problem. The biggest problem with the "paperless" office is flexibility, particularly with regard to changing work flows. Paper has many drawbacks but it has the HUGE advantage that it is enormously flexible and adaptable to different work flows. I can design a form and make lots of copies and change a work flow in minutes without anyone else needing access to a computer. To have a paperless system you need a significant amount of pr
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I will admit there are two things still missing.
A decent document format, that allows annotations. PDF comes close but doesn't quite cut it.
Ubiquity with digitizers in tablets.
I have a tex file that I can generate a pdf notebook of n blank pages, where I choose n.
Things like forms, well even a secretary can modify an existing form.
Job instructions can be kept in text files that can be pushed to tablets. Guaranteeing that every person has updated instructions.
Why tablets aren't yet a solution (Score:3)
I will admit there are two things still missing.
There is quite a bit more than two things missing though I agree with the deficiencies you identify among others.
Job instructions can be kept in text files that can be pushed to tablets. Guaranteeing that every person has updated instructions.
You REALLY do not want tablets on most manufacturing floors. The products we work with would trash a tablet in about a week if not sooner and we don't even do anything especially messy. Furthermore that would require buying an expensive computer for every worker on our shop floor, many of which would, ummm... disappear. What we do is keep the Controlled master copy online and then print a refe
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I use about 10 pages a week from the printer, most of that is me being overly cautious with making sure I have effective notes or references on hand for a meeting. It's faster to sort through three pages of prepared documents than dig through an endless list of emails on my work blackberry.
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The real irony is that since the "paperless office" dream came about, we're using more paper than ever before. Even before the paperless office and computers!
I think what really happened is not the "paperless office", but "paperless INTERoffice". We're not shipping reams of paper around - we're sending them around electronically. And instead of receiving and sending that paper, we're scanning and printing it.
I like having things pri
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Tell that to the lawyers and accountants, or the designers and architects and they will laugh you right out the door. Do you have any idea how many times the world has heard that the paperless world is coming? The answer is never, as with any other "ideal" it's a nice dream and goal to work toward (and we should) but achieving it is impossible. Besides, paper is a renewable resource. It's the ink and toner, and the hardware for printing that aren't renewable.
I did work for an international LLC law firm 10+ years ago. They had migrated everything to a Documentum system. All of their paperwork was scanned and included in this system which made it available to anyone that needed to see it; lawyers in the firm, or clients.
My partner is currently working for local government scanning their planning records into a similar system.
In both cases the original paper documents are destroyed after the electronic copy is made.
Over here in the UK I can access most government
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I can't speak for him, but I use the one at the local library. I have to go put five cents into that machine a few times a year. At this rate it would be cheaper to buy a printer in about three hundred years. There's also one at work I can use.
Why does this seem fishy? (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, printing has not become more personal, not mobile. All I see used in practice these days are huge office high performance machines, you know, the ones that can spew 100 pages per minutes, with documents being sent to them from real computers.
The mobile devices (smartphones and especially tablets) made electronic documents viable and portable, so nobody prints things from their phones or tablets - they already have a presentation of the document, a paper copy is not needed. Definitely there is no smartphone to printer workflow at homes.
Re:Why does this seem fishy? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The mobile devices (smartphones and especially tablets) made electronic documents viable and portable, so nobody prints things from their phones or tablets - they already have a presentation of the document, a paper copy is not needed.
I would say less needed. There have been times where a mobile boarding pass was not good enough to get me through security at an airport. I had to go to a kiosk and print out a paper one.
Definitely there is no smartphone to printer workflow at homes.
Do you mean there commonly is not a printer workflow because AirPrint [wikipedia.org] works well at my home. It runs on a Samsung printer hooked up to a Linux server running CUPS.
Re: Why does this seem fishy? (Score:5, Funny)
One day someone will try to return a faulty printer to a company that insist they print the return label...
Printer drivers (Score:2)
Printer drivers are going away, and mobile usage is now the norm.
No. The norm is not printing.
Not printing? Hah! (Score:2)
No. The norm is not printing.
Maybe on some other planet. Not in any office I've ever worked in.
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Yes, and we use mainly laptops, projectors and large TVs for the video-conferences.
The only paper I use is the one I write on with a pen. No printer there.
What exactly do you use a printer in an office nowadays? Do you print your mails? Do you print Power Point slides? Excels?
No, wait. Trying to imagine your office I found one use I make of the printer. I print flight tickets for work trips, in case my phone dies on the path to the airport.
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Printing RMA sheets for returning materials to vendors. and the shipping labels that go on the boxes. Printing invoices to be sent to the customers. Printing paychecks. Yes some people still like getting a paycheck.
I also print out on a large format printer blueptints on the large design jet. Damn contractors refuse to get 21" ipads to view the drawings.
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I just write the confirmation code onto a small scrap of paper and put that in my wallet. Why print a whole page when the only thing you want is most likely 8-12 alphanumerics long? Ticketless flights have been the norm for over a decade now.
What real people do in an office (Score:2)
What exactly do you use a printer in an office nowadays?
Invoices, bills, work instructions, checks, deposit slips, customer statements, engineering drawings, purchase orders, material safety data sheets, 1099 forms, W2 forms, I9 forms, pick lists, work orders, quality travelers, shipping labels, packing lists and lots more. I personally print about 1000-2000 pages per month. My (tiny) company probably prints around 3000 pages per month on average. This is very normal for even a very small business.
I have worked a LOT of places and I've never seen a functiona
Clueless (Score:2)
Non-engineers don't really need much paper...
Bullshit they don't. I defy you to find me anyone working in accounting or HR that isn't positively drowning in paper. Some have more than others but most real businesses use quite a lot of printed paper.
Just in time. (Score:2)
It only took as much as actually being able to have a paperless office.
Surprised noone said this yet (Score:2, Funny)
CUPS 2.0, girl 1
captcha: quantify
Maybe now.... (Score:2)
Epson printers will actually work.
Honestly, I blame Epson for the failure, they cant write drivers to save their lives.
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I have an Epson WF-7510 and the drivers for OSX, Windows, and Android seem solid. There's a lot of stupid optional cruft, but there's a just-the-driver option.
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I haven't seen an Epson printer in a long time. I see HP, Brothers, Panasonic, but not Epsons.
You're probably not a photographer then. They've always been around with photo printers since digital photography became the thing.
Cups for Windows (Score:2)
I wish there was a CUPS layer for Windows, so we could install it as a driver and just use the tinly little PPD like other Operating systems do rather than the 600-900Mb monstrosities that manufacturers provide as drivers.
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The top result in google for "cups 2.0" is https://www.cups.org/ [cups.org] click the software tab.
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Re:Where? (Score:4, Informative)
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File bugs or email the webmaster if you have trouble with a web site.
In the case of CUPS.org, it is using Bootstrap and the intent is for the navigation to switch to a vertical menu (that can be hidden) when the width gets too narrow. There should be enough space to keep the regular menu "bar" down to 768 pixels wide at least, and if that is breaking you need to tell the CUPS.org webmaster about it, otherwise it won't get fixed...
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https://www.cups.org/software.php
Was that really that hard?
Your geek card is void. Return it asap.
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple is not the developer of CUPS. Apple bought CUPS back in 2007 [slashdot.org] and hired its main developer.
CUPS is an example of the sort of hairy mess that open-source developers don't like to deal with, like OpenSSL. It was the inspiration for Eric Raymond (the main guy of the Open Source movement) to scold the OSS community [catb.org] back in 2004. I think Eric Raymond's ire is misplaced; CUPS was uniquely horrible back then. But printing in Unix has always been bad, and CUPS made it much better than before, so everybody standardized on it.
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Personally, I never got why the Open Source companies didn't get behind a project like LPRng. In the early 2000s, LPRng was awesome. It was basically an lpd on steroids. It worked like LPD and read printcap, but had support for pretty much any printing protocol, filter, access control lists, quota system, etc. The syntax of the configuration file made managing large site a breeze.
But you see, the open source companies like RedHat decided that simple printcap syntax was too complicated, so they had to throw
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the keyword there is companies. The main reason for CUPS is support for IPP, a particularly enterprisey protocol. I could tell that it's enterprisey because it's full of XML and I couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work. Once I got printing to work, I didn't bother to look further into it. Printing is just an occasional hassle for me.
Of course, once CUPS got the momentum, then CUPS got more support, more printer drivers, more GUI front-ends, so right now it's just easier to get a working system using CUPS than LPRng. I'm surprised that LPRng is still seeing development as late as 2012, and the web site [lprng.com] apparently got tweaked in March this year.
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
IPP doesn't use XML, it uses a (flat) binary message encoding. I imagine that had IPP been developed a few years later things would have been different... And while it definitely supports what is needed in the enterprise, it also satisfies the consumer space - ~500 million printers in service today (from consumer inkjets to big iron office copiers) support IPP, as does *every* consumer and enterprise computer and mobile device (billions of devices). IPP scales well.
The problem with LPRng was that it was a mess of scripts and hacks to make a variety of printers work. Every "driver" worked differently, and (having spent a fair amount of time with it 20 years ago) making it all work without an expert supporting it was basically impossible. It continued to use an extended version of the LPD protocol (which has nothing other than an informative RFC to document it, with most implementations varying from the RFC in some way) and did not address some pretty basic security issues like hiding job information from other users.
Back in 1998 there was little support for standard languages or doing a proper protocol so that you could monitor a printer's state or cancel a job. Vendors used proprietary languages and protocols to lock you into their drivers, their platform, their products. The whole point of CUPS was to define a standard interface with standard options for drivers while providing a better security model. Yes, that did make it more complicated than LPD/LPRng, but that complexity was needed since printing is *hard* and the software needed to support it is non-trivial. IPP was chosen as the underlying protocol and model because it offered everything needed from regular users to enterprise.
Ultimately CUPS succeeded because it allowed people to print without becoming experts. It allowed Linux distributors to actually support printing, and for printer manufacturers and third parties to provide drivers that "just worked". And it did it using public standards and the very UNIX-y interface of piped commands.
While CUPS continues to carry some old baggage around to keep supporting old printers, the day will come when that is no longer necessary and a leaner version (possibly based on the ippserver code) will be able to replace it. Today the economics favor printers implementing common, open standards so that all platforms can support them without extra, expensive development. Within a few years, it should be possible to retire printer drivers entirely.
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I think Eric Raymond's ire is misplaced; CUPS was uniquely horrible back then.
Follow ESR on G+, it's hilarious. You probably won't last long.
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
CUPS was horrible then, but Linux printing in general was about 15,000x times more horrible with LPD/LPR being the standard and leaving you with pretty much the choice between a postfix printer (which was pretty pricey until the mid-'00s) or an Epson dot matrix printer. There were a handful of print solutions but they were either very expensive or totally sucked.
CUPS made printing on Linux mostly painless.
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In LPD you would configure the printcap to run ghostscript (basically your printer drivers) to convert the postscript to the native printer language. The LPD did allow non-postscript printers to be used this way. It didnt work all that badly.
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I never knew CUPS was an Apple product but I remember installing it back in, what, probably 2000 on some Linux machines in college, as part of my work-study job. That must have been immediately after it was introduced.
You are right: the LPR system it replaced was awful. I don't remember much about CUPS except that I got it to work.
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Uh, CUPS made things new, but darned if I can figure out the magic of how its filters work compared to, say, LPRng, and the last time I went spelunking around in the CUPS code, well, I've since shutdown that print server and have outsourced printing to groups who are about as enthusiastic to support printing (oh boy, random software programs being thrown at random software execution environments, plus a real-world interface that jams when that room gets humid so ya gotta prop the door open, see?) as we were
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Printing has always been uniquely horrible no matter the OS. Printing in DOS was
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is not the developer of CUPS. Apple bought CUPS back in 2007 [slashdot.org] and hired its main developer.
So... the guy that works on it is hired by Apple, and the project is owned and financed by Apple. Isn't that essentially the same as Apple develops CUPS?
No. If Apple had developed it, it would not have had any command-line interface except for XML files and the "defaults" program, its interfaces would have been proprietary to Apple, and it would have been even more confusingly documented. It would never have become widely adopted across the Unix world, partly because Apple would not have chosen GPLv2. Instead, Lennart Poettering [0pointer.net] would have been so in awe of it that he would have created his own unstable version of it, which would immediately have been adopted across the Linux distributions to the exclusion of any other printing system, because Lennart is the best programmer and all crashes are everybody else's fault. It would have stabilized when he got bored and started copying another Apple innovation. Like, say, launchd. [wikipedia.org]
CUPS was widely used before Apple bought it. Apple can't turn it into an Apple-like program without causing a user revolt, so it's still very much like how it was before Apple bought it.
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
No. If Apple had developed it, it would not have had any command-line interface except for XML files and the "defaults" program, its interfaces would have been proprietary to Apple,
Yes that's why LLVM, Clang, OpenCL, Zero-Configuration, and WebKit only works on Apple machines.
and it would have been even more confusingly documented.
Yes because all open source software is meticulously documented.
It would never have become widely adopted across the Unix world, partly because Apple would not have chosen GPLv2.
Yes Apple would never choose GPLv2 unlike all the other GPLv2 software they've chosen to use. [apple.com]
CUPS was widely used before Apple bought it. Apple can't turn it into an Apple-like program without causing a user revolt, so it's still very much like how it was before Apple bought it.
Yes Apple is EVIL for not completely changing the software they own to be proprietary and they are also EVIL for forking software they didn't own (WebKit). Face it folks, Apple can do no right.
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No. If Apple had developed it, it would not have had any command-line interface except for XML files and the "defaults" program, its interfaces would have been proprietary to Apple,
Yes that's why LLVM, Clang, OpenCL, Zero-Configuration, and WebKit only works on Apple machines.
Wait, what? Where'd all this hostility come from? I've used Macs for 25 years, and I'm using a Mac to type this. I like parts of Apple and MacOS X, but I recognize some of its shortcomings. In my opinion, nothing is perfect.
I didn't say that Apple does not do open source. CUPS, LLVM, Clang, and KHTML (predecessor of WebKit) were not invented at Apple, and Apple complies with the license terms of the original projects. ZeroConf and OpenCL are examples of basic infrastructure that Apple decided would be in th
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I notice Apple protocols such as AirPlay and AirPrint, the whole Designed for iPhone licensing system, and how Apple is going out of their way to avoid any GPLv3 software such as Samba 3.
Oops, I meant Samba 4. Starting in MacOS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has used the closed-source SMBX instead of Samba to provide SMB service, and Apple's SMB client is licensed under APSL 2.0, which is not compatible with GPL. Apple's SMB software has also been slower and buggier than Samba.
I think Apple's aversion to GPLv3 is wrongheaded, as is Google's avoidance of GPL in Android other than the kernel. I'm not saying that it's evil, just a mistake.
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LLVM and Clang were developed at the University of Illinois.
And Apple hired the team that developed LLVM to continue to develop it further. Just like CUPS. As for Clang, it was developed originally by Apple to work with LLVM because Apple had performance and philosophical issues with gcc.
OpenCL is a standard, not a program.
OpenCL standards for Open Computing Language. It is also a standard as many companies have adopted it. That's like saying C99 isn't language but a standard.
Zeroconf is a standard, not a program.
Again, because something becomes a standard does not mean it isn't used for what it was originally designed.
WebKit is a fork of KHTML from the KDE project. Try again.
Originally, WebKit
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CUPS was widely used before Apple bought it. Apple can't turn it into an Apple-like program without causing a user revolt, so it's still very much like how it was before Apple bought it.
Apple users are obviously not going to revolt if Apple turns it into an Apple-like program (anyway, the UI that I see is quite Apple-like).
And non-Apple users? They can be as revolting as they like. There is always the possibility to fork CUPS.
BTW, Apple is dual licensing CUPS: You can get it under the GPL, or under a license that allows you to keep your source code private, as long as you create a driver that works on Macs. Since many printer manufacturers for whatever reason didn't want to release t
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Yes, he's trolling,
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He should have said Apple is not the "original" developer of CUPS which is true. They are the current developer and owner of CUPS.
(And current employer of the original developer of CUPS, unless he's left.)
Re:Web server for printing... (Score:5, Informative)
Because it makes the printer a standalone computer and allows usage without the need of any extra driver, therefore not only your mac/pc but any smartphone, game console, electric car, smart rice cooker, etc can use it without support from the actual printer manufacturer. That is particular important as the number of computing platforms is increasing, and the cost to support every single one of them is not small. We've came in to an age that even a dollar ARM cortex M3 CPU can host a web server. Why not use this abundant extra computing power? Security? The incompetence with computers of strangers is not my concern.
Re:Web server for printing... (Score:5, Interesting)
...because web protocols are universal and easy to use.
Ask yourself this question. Should I use a standard protocol with tons of tools an an ecosystem to support it or should I use a totally custom protocol to handle everything?
Why you'd need to write custom complicated protocols from scratch for everything always riddled me.
Maybe you think because theres less overhead it's better. IDK, but I reject that premise.
Disclaimer: I work with a bunch of stubborn hardware engineers that sometimes refuse to give up their false permises about software.
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who said the web protocols aren't "totally custom" in relation to other web protocols for sending a file to print?
now there's standards like bluetooth for printing that don't need driver, but suck for various reasons.
even still, the only time anyone I knew personally printed anything from a mobile device was over 10 years ago and that was in an electronics store, printing goatse over bluetooth to a printer on display.
so I don't really get it how mobile is the norm, most people print from some pc or another
Re: Web server for printing... (Score:5, Funny)
You've convince me! Your anecdotal experience is enough for me to believe that no one needs to print from mobile devices....
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Me too! And I do it all the time.
No more, thank god.
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I've had to support quite a few environments where people wanted to print from Palm devices, PocketPCs, Android phones, Blackberry devices, etc. And they don't want to hear that a device doesn't work with their whatever (especially if it's the CEO's daughter), they just want a solution.
Re:Web server for printing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Our office has pretty much replaced laptops with iPads for 90% of the people. They didn't need a portable device for anything other than checking their calendar, email and basic web browsing (since almost all of our apps are now designed for the browser, we don't need custom, PC based apps anymore). It turns out, when you do that, those people start to demand to be able to print their emails, web pages, etc. from those mobile devices.
And this is a growing trend. Look at all the business people carrying around iPads / Tablets in favor of heavier laptops.
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There's a wifi enabled printer at the religious place I go, gets used every other week or so for printing out emails, forms and misc instructions, all from mobile devices. You may not print from mobile but it does have its uses.
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That hacked jet printer is interesting. Maybe a print server will be useful, with the function of printing a page of random interesting text once in a week so that the printing head don't get clogged from stale unused ink.
Inkjet is evil for that (and after an Epson one that refused to print black when it was out of yellow, how can they be trusted?, which one can be trusted?)
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even still, the only time anyone I knew personally printed anything from a mobile device was over 10 years ago and that was in an electronics store, printing goatse over bluetooth to a printer on display.
The last time I did it was this morning when my kid's school emailed a permission slip that I needed to sign and return. I like not having to go find my laptop, locate the same email, and print from there when the thing I want printed is already being displayed on the phone screen that I'm staring at.
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*shrug* I print out email messages from my phone fairly regularly (reservation confirmations, for example). I could go into the other room, boot up the computer, bring up thunderbird, and print from there, but I like not having to spend that much time on it.
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Yes, you should use the standard protocol [ietf.org]... which means you should not be shoehorning printer control stuff into some custom monstrosity layered on top of HTTP!
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LPD never was standardized. Every implementation is different, and RFC 1179 tried to document the common stuff - you'll note the status is Informational.
And I wouldn't call a simple HTTP POST-based interface a "monstrosity". IPP has a well-defined binary message format (no XML bloat), security model, and state machine that is deployed on billions of devices and has proven interoperability, something that LPD never achieved.
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I think OP might mean instead of a different type of server and didn't realize web servers can be extremely small when tasked with one singular purpose.
Re:Web server for printing... (Score:4, Informative)
The canonical way are lpstat, lpadmin, lpoptions and friends
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What does a GUI have to do with a web server? You could write a graphical front-end to lpstat (etc.) without bothering with the HTTP and whatnot and it'd probably turn out better.
Re:Web server for printing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Because then you have to write a front-end GUI for every OS out there -- Linux (all 200 flavors of it, because, you know..), Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Blackberry, Canon DSLRs, etc., etc.
It turns out, writing your GUI on top of HTTP is really nice, and means you just have to expose it, and let the browser on the existing OSs take care of the hard work of drawing the button on the screen.
Re:Web server for printing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The web server serves as a non graphical front-end too.
You can ssh into the piece of crap computer with parallel port laser printer attached, and run elinks from there.
That's the power of web 1.0 for you.
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...except that lpstat etc. already exist, so there wasn't a need to do that in the first place.
Re:OpenSSL support dropped... (Score:4, Informative)
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OpenSSL has proven to be too big and too much of an untested surface area. Although I'm saddened they didn't move to CommonCrypto.
Re:OpenSSL support dropped... (Score:4, Informative)
GnuTLS is just one of the supported TLS toolkits. It uses the Security framework on OS X, and SChannel on Windows.
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OpenSSL is also incompatible with GPL, so projects like CUPS need to ship with an exception.
Re:OpenSSL support dropped... (Score:5, Insightful)
The recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities were just the nail in the coffin. It was more a matter of limited developer resources and the relative difficulty of implementing certification validation with the OpenSSL APIs vs. GNU TLS. (and don't forget we also support SecureTransport on OS X and Schannel on Windows...)
Much better to focus on making support for one popular TLS library on Linux/*BSD than to do a half-assed job for two libraries, one of which has known vulnerabilities and API/forking issues.
Re: (Score:2)
Always good to hear things from the original source! Thanks for posting.
Just fyi, your "homepage" link refers to your old Easy Software web site, which no longer exists. Apparently an e-cigarette company has bought up your old domain name!
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly I don't know. But the number of systems still running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL is non-trivial...
In any case, the primary reason for dropping OpenSSL support is limited developer resources - GNU TLS is a lot easier to interface with and support certificate validation than OpenSSL. Nothing says the old OpenSSL support could not be brought back, but there is basically no advantage in doing so.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't read the LWN article yet but licensing was not a reason for dropping OpenSSL, and all things being equal there are no issues with including an exception for OpenSSL's license incompatibility or using an OpenSSL library that is part of the standard OS libraries.
OpenSSL was dropped because there were only resources to support one TLS library on free software OS's and the GNU TLS API and implementation are superior to OpenSSL.
Re: (Score:3)
If you logged in, the system would happily remember your preference. When you tell the system that you don't want to be remembered, don't blame it for not remembering you.
Re: (Score:2)
Optimistically, fax represents 0.0004% of daily usage of printers from computers. Most fax happens directly at the printer with hardcopy getting fed in. And most people in the printing industry have been hoping/praying that fax will die for like 20 years now. The only reason for its continued existence is the questionable legal standing that faxed documents are valid and safe for contracts and medical information while secure transport over the Internet (TLS, PGP, etc.) is not.
Scan gets slightly more usage
Re: (Score:2)
Just curious, what would be your favorite (laser) printer?
Re: (Score:2)
That's what I thought, too. I'd never known that.
Now think all the way back to A/UX [wikipedia.org].