Improving Ubuntu Help/Docs part 1 of 3

[Matthew East]

Hi David,

Thanks for this. A preliminary remark: your tone is extremely
aggressive, and is quite likely to rile people unless you tone it down a
bit: if you express yourself more positively, it will help give your
feedback greater weight.

On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 10:12 +1000, David Tangye wrote:
> Last week I returned to PC and Ubuntu-land as I installed it onto a
> second PC at my kids place. The PC is networked and needs to send print
> to a Windows PC. 

{snip}

> I got an idea that the CUPS
> config was set up wrong and that no update of the CUPS package had ever
> fixed it. Great, so thousands of people all over the planet are
> installing Ubuntu, finding they cant print anything unless they connect
> a printer up to that machine, shake their heads sadly and move back to
> Windows. There they just print to any printer on the network.

I'm sorry that you had this experience: my experience with network
printing at the office was completely different. Setting up to print to
the network printer took me two minutes, using only graphical tools,
without installing any extra drivers or packages (please file a bug or
comment on an existing bug report if you can't do this). On the other
hand, I have tried to do it from my Windows partition, and still to this
day haven't succeeded in doing it (unless I make my login details the
same as my network login). Although, I haven't made much of an effort
because I don't use Windows at all.

> I worked out how to print over a network, and so I have written
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkPrintingWithUbuntu and redirected
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkPrintingFromUbuntu to it.

Thanks for this work: as you've pointed out the printing documentation
is not very comprehensive. Two comments without having read the pages in
detail: first, try and use graphical tools where at all possible. For
example, on the client side it is possible to setup the printer without
dropping to a terminal or editing configuration files manually.
Secondly, try and integrate it as much as possible with the existing
pages dealing with printing. I'm not familiar with what exists and what
doesn't, but a cursory search found:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WindowsXPPrinter

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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