Ubuntu as print server

[Chosechu]

Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Two or three lines to add in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf on the server side,
> one line to add in /etc/cups/client.conf on the client side, restart,
> serve hot. Details see below.

Will try. Thanks for the tip!

> Forget the GUIs. I'm a Slack veteran, so believe me: vi is your friend
> for configuring your PC :oD (I l-o-v-e Ubuntu though... first non-Slack
> distro I really dig)

You have a point there, which I'd like to digress upon. Allow me.

Having fought for years with Unix, I do enjoy having only ASCII
files to deal with to configure complex systems. Allows for all
kinds of scripts and cron job manipulations and automated tasks
and the like. Neat. But there are some times when you just want
things to run out of the box, nothing fancy nor evolved, and you
have no intention of becoming the expert in town for that topic.

In that particular case: I have a printer connected to an Ubuntu box
and I would like to share it with other computers on the LAN. On a Mac
this means ticking a box in System Preferences. On Windows I have no
idea but it is probably not terribly more complex. On Linux I have
never been able to sort that through in a repeatable way. I used Debian
a lot and dist-upgrading regularly broke my CUPS settings, to a point
where printing had just become a recurrent half-day task I had to plan
in advance if I needed some things printed out on schedule. I used to
have a CVS repository running just to store /etc files because they
would be broken during most upgrades. I am probably ahead of my time
but I'd consider printer sharing on a LAN something you should not need
veteran skills to get done.

Ok, 'nuff said. I guess the next constructive step will be to gather
knowledge about CUPS and try to build some configuration scripts or
GUI that just turn the feature on by massaging configuration files
correctly without requiring the user to become a CUPS expert. CUPS
is a nice system but we all have other things to deal with, don't we?

Same argument probably applies to many other common user needs.
I have no doubt Ubuntu can reach a user-friendly level at least similar
to what Mac OS has, it is already partly there.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, I really mean to be constructive here.

-- 
Chosechu <chosechu at gmail.com>