The hidden benefits of free software

NewsForge ^ | 4/15/2006 | Robin 'Roblimo' Miller

[FLAMING DEATH]

There are just a lot of things in KDE that could be better handled by walking you through with a wizard or providing more instructions.

For example, when you network a printer. If you already know how to do it, it's a process that takes about 3 minutes. If you don't, it can take weeks.

When I wanted to connect my laptop to the printer on my desktop in my upstairs office, I ran the Add Printer Wizard in KDE. Now, this works great, most often perfectly, if you're adding a local printer.

But, when you add a network printer, it gives you two options (TCP and IPP). All I needed was a recommendation to know where to start, but since I didn't know which would be the best method, I was off to Google. Eventually, I settled on IPP.

Then, I had to get my laptop to see the printer on the network. It asked me for the IPP address of the printer I wanted to use. So, I went to the upstairs office and found it: ipp://office:631/printers/psc1210. Easy, right? Selected the driver, clicked OK, and waited for it to print a test page. Nothing happened.

After a few days of trying to figure this out, I finally realized that you have to find the actual local IP of the computer that has the printer attached to it and substitute it for the hostname (office) in the line above. As soon as I did that, presto, worked perfectly.

Without a WAG, there's no way to know this. The documentation needs to be in place to explain this more thoroughly, especially so that someone walking through it for the first time can at least know what to try without having to fall back on Google and endless hours of searching.

I've networked printers in Windows before, and it's way more straightforward than this. There's no reason that I see that it couldn't be that way in KDE.

I don't want to make it sound like I don't like KDE. The ways you can customize it are mind boggling. But, there are places where it needs to be a little more user friendly.

On the other hand, I have to say that networking printers in KDE is completely automatic in a lot of cases, so for 90% of the time, this isn't even an issue. You just hit "print" and it works.

[Golden Eagle]

Money sent to a foreign corporation does nothing to bolster the local economy.

Apparently written by someone outside the U.S., like most of your sources. For those of us actually IN the U.S., and who want to see the U.S. succeed, WE would obviously prefer the opposite - money coming into the U.S. to buy our products, not having our products replaced by free ones created outside the U.S.

[N3WBI3]

Well we had a nice weekend on the tech threads..