[TriLUG] print queues work locally, but not over the network

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 11 December 2006 09:32, Alan Porter wrote:
> > but when you print to it on those printers it "vanishes into thin air".
>
> New eco-friendly paper saving feature in Mandriva?

Yes. They build it into their firewall, so that you save paper unless you 
absolutely, positively must print, in which case you can use nfs or sftp to 
get it to the physically connected machine. I managed to defeat this feature 
by setting the firewall to pass CUPS packets (or the CUPS port or whatever).

I've had a love-hate relationship with Mandrake, and then Mandriva since mid 
2000, which is when i started using it. On the one hand, it comes with great 
apps and it's set up as a spectaciularly good desktop machine. It's also very 
friendly for a guy with dialup -- most of what you need is on the Install 
DVD.

On the other hand, most versions come with at least one bogus symlink that 
drives you crazy, and other PITAs that make you nuts until you solve them. 
Almost a year ago I performed a "distro shootout" with Debian, Knoppix DVD, 
SuSE and Mandriva 2006. Debian was ruled out because my dialup connection 
makes extensive use of apt-get unreasonable. If I download a package, I like 
to download it and save it locally so I can use it time after time (and 
probably some of you know how I can use apt-get to do that, and I'd be 
interested). Knoppix DVD just didn't have all the apps I use on an everyday 
basis. Because I've used Red Hat 1998-2000, and Mandrake/Mandriva since 2000, 
Debian based distros seem a little strange to me, so they'd need to yield big 
gains before I'd switch. SuSE was a great desktop, it really was. Perhaps if 
I didn't have 6 years history with Mandrake/Mandriva I would have chosen 
SuSE, but the two were just too close to call, so I went with the devil I 
knew.

I've had a lot of trouble with Mandriva 2007. They've started leaving out apps 
included in earlier distro versions. Some of those apps (like pdftk) are 
mission critical. Luckily, someone on TriLUG pointed out the pbone.net site, 
where you can get all things Mandriva, at least when you can log into the 
site. 

Now that I need to download more with Mandriva 2007, I'm finally going to get 
broadband in January. Of course, once I get broadband, Debian and Gentoo 
become practical :-)

By the way, if anyone has Mandriva questions, I'm probably a pretty good 
person to ask.

SteveT