Student Control Panel Mods/Suggestions

[Jim Kronebusch]

> I've seen some back and forth with the printers thing, and IMHO, this isn't really
> part of LTSP.  The same way setting up desktop defaults really isn't part of LTSP
> either.  Really, this should be part of the cups printing subsystem.

I guess that since LTSP is what is providing the OS and other settings to the clients, I
just figured it would be the best mechanism to set up printing as well.  But if CUPS had
the capability to do this that would be great.  You LTSP guys are just so darn good at
adding/creating features it is too tempting to not ask :-)

Since SCP looks like the future in thin client management, it just made sense to me to
build in features to collect data and build groups/set group options from there.  Maybe
this isn't the intention of SCP.  I think that TeacherTool has a feature for collecting
MAC addresses so that is what prompted these thoughts.

Ultimately I think it would be great when working with an LTSP server to not have to
simply add every printer in the whole network to it and script a default, for larger
installations that could just get messy.  I think it would be great to have the printers
created on client boot up based on their location.  Say a client in LabA starts up, it
knows based on its mac address that it is in LabA, and then can create PrinterA and set
it as its default.  Now when a student logs in and goes to print, only PrinterA is
available instead of PrinterA being a default and having a list of all existing
printers.  Much cleaner, but maybe not possible.

If memory servers me right I thought that Francis Giraldeau from MilleXTerm said that
their setup has this capability.

But I am sure that if you say this shouldn't be LTSP's responsibility and it should be a
feature in CUPS, you are probably right.

> That having been said, assigning any kind of defaults based upon terminal MAC address
> isn't that hard to do, and this recipe should be part of any good LTSP admins
> bag of tricks.

Thank you very much Scott.  Those scripts I am sure will be very handy in creating a
work around to get this working.  Regardless of who "should" handle this, I still need
some way to set defaults this school year.

On another note Gavin has some suggestions and is working on some ideas on how to create
an option in lts.conf to trigger a default printer function in ldm.

Thanks again,
Jim

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