On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 11:51 +0100, Johannes Meixner wrote:
Hello,
On Mar 8 10:59 JP Rosevear wrote (shortened):
1) It sucks for home users to have to enter a password to setup a printer.
How often does a home user set up a printer?
When it comes to a USB printer, how about every time it's disconnected/connected?? I've got a HP Photosmart printer at home. If I configure it (with root), then I can print. But if I turn it off and then back on, cups will show it as online, but when I print to it, nothing will happen. There won't even be a document in the printer queue. So, the only thing (well, shouldn't say that it's the only thing, but...) I can do is to delete the old printer and re-add it. Then I can print again. Again, this require root. I tried to browse to localhost:631 and put the printer in off-line mode, then on-line mode again, but to no avail (off course, to be able to do that, I need to login as root). If I try to add a new printer while the non-functional one is still there, I get an error message that it can't find <name-of-the-printer>-2. If I hadn't forced my G/F to run Linux on her laptop, I could not have cared less, but... As it happens, she is running Linux and she can not print more than once per session without having to re-install the printer. Yes, I should probably report this behaviour as a bug. No, she shouldn't have to ask me what the username/password is in localhost:631 to try to restart the printer.
The system admin password is only needed when a new printer is added or the existing printer is replaced by a different model.
Wrong! See above...
A normal user can change and store his own printer specific settings in his ~/.lpoptions (CUPS 1.1) or ~/.cups/lpoptions (CUPS 1.2) file usually via the various printing dialog tools (kprinter, gtklp, xpp, lpoptions) but not via the various printer setup tools (which do the admin-related stuff).
Will a normal user know about these files? Or are you confirming JPR's idea of having something to simplify printing on Linux?
I can only guess that printer setup which really requires the system admin password happens about once in a year for a home user. Does it really suck to enter a password about once in a year?
See above.
Perhaps the real cause of the problem is that normal users can access in their desktop menues the printer setup tools and then they think they must use them to change printer specific settings?
How else would they *set* the printer settings? At the moment, printing in Linux sucks big time. I'm not only blaiming cups for that. OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat Reader etc is equally bad at it (OpenOffice refuses to use the paper size set on the printer and Reader wants to print to lpr) suck as well.
2) Large corporate environments don't want to give out a root password,
This is a very valid request.
Agreed!
Even in a home user environment the person who works as system admin may not want to give out his root password for example to all members of his family.
See my answer above. Even if I wanted to give the username/password to my G/F, she wouldn't understand when to use it and how.
Right now Klaus Kaempf explained the background to me:
It is not only about printing, it is a very general problem that currently we have onyl a "either all or nothing" policy: Either root who has unlimited permissions or normal user who has almost no permissions.
This is correct. I would like to see everything on the Desktop simplified like JPR explained. If I plugin, for an example, an extra Network card, I don't want to have to go to YaST to configure it. I want a pop-up on my Desktop telling me that it found new hardware, and give me an option to configure it (if this can be done securely without requiring the root password, even better!) Cheers, Magnus --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org