Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Printing

The old mac G4 server died and it handled the printing for the linux machines, operating as a print server over ethernet. I was tempted by a mac mini but decided to hold off a bit. This meant we had to do something about the printing. I was able to set up Ubuntu to go to the HP jetdirect printer server which drives an ancient apple laserwriter 360 which is the printer for the windoze machines. It works fine but the 360 is very old and when the cartridge runs out it's off to the curb. So i need a better solution for Godzilla, the dual xeon desktop. Which was upgraded this fall to 2 gig of ram, a usb 2.0 card and an nvidia 7600GT video card. The 320 hard disk is sitting there waiting for install...real soon now.

Anyway - our first attempt was to uplug the ethernet from the printer and switch it to parallel.
The printer is an Apple Laserwriter 630 pro, a nice black and white postscript beast. Hauled out an lpt cable from the box and connected it up.

Installation is easy, select system, administration, printing. Choose local printer and select lpt1 port and apple and the model. However, when i printed a test page the postscipt caused an error right after the settings code was sent, right after the %%Title: PPR test page and it printed blank sheets.

The ports are auto configuring but the setup was done using the osx server printer utility - which i no longer have up and running. I could try hooking up one of the many macs lying around and use the localtalk connection and the os9 printer utility to see if the settings can be changed.....or use Plan Z.

Plan Z is to use the NEC 1800 postscript laser printer that has been sitting around gathering dust. Nice printer. So we connect it up with the parallel cable. Of course the rest of the apple test page spits out 4 pages of postsript code until we get an %EOF.

We goto into the printer administration control panel and select lpt1, NEC, 1800 and print out a test page. The Ubuntu Ghostscript version 3010 revision 861 test page comes out. Very nice. We could set this printer up as a share for a backup to the HP jetdirect if the apple 360 dies suddenly. Would be interesting to see if the windoze systems can see it. The printer has an ethernet port but when i put it on the network before the XP boxes could not print to it.

Now we have to put the apple 630 to use - perhaps as a mac os9 printer...

Friday, September 26, 2008

Open Source Portable Applications

One of the problems in evaluating open source is that all computer labs and most work environments do not allow you to install anything. So how do you try something new?

The answer is portable applications - programs that do not have to be installed to run. Because open source is open, people have been able to modify the programs to make them run without needing installation. This means you can keep them on your USB stick until needed. And since open source is platform agnostic there are even windows versions.

We ran into the usual IT dept roadblock a few terms ago when we wanted to teach LAMP. They finally put up a server but restricted access so severely that there was no point. The solution was to run a portable LAMP stack called server2go. (Hong Cui; Nickerson, Gordon. Journal of Education for Library & Information Science. September, 2007. )

Since then, the number of portable applications has exploded as they provided a real solution to the 'locked-down' windows-only computers in most organizations.

The wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_portable_software is not exhaustive but lists a large variety of software suitable for your USB stick. Most are packaged in PortableApps.com format which uses a PortableApps launcher (either embedded or standalone) and are for Windows. A list of mac portable apps is at: http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/
although macs have always had 'portable' apps because you can run many programs from CD or disk images.

Graphics

GIMP portable - graphics program for windows and osx
GIMPshop - photoshop like version.
There is also X-inkscape a vector graphics program at http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=657 and copies of Tuxpaint and Zpaint.

Word Processing

Portable Abiword is at http://abiword-portable.en.softonic.com/ and portable open office is at https://sourceforge.net/projects/portableoo/and even the desktop publishing scribus software is portable. See https://sourceforge.net/projects/portablescribus/

There are lots of other stuff i can't wait to try including bittorrent clients and Mojopac, a portable chopped down copy of windows that you create.

The growth in portable apps shows once again the amount of innovation that occurs when people have access to the source code!

October Update - we finally got around to building the USB key of open source apps and it is working well. What we need now is to figure out which are the fastest USB keys on the market and go buy a big one. The next step is to move the XAMPP stack off the computer and onto the USB, i read that it can be done and integrated into the portableapps menu - perfect for the January term. What i am wondering about now is producing a class set of pre-configured USB keys ready to go. This would save a lot of time and problems. There are hardware-based USB duplicators but they are expensive. Since many computers have 6 or more USB slots running off several buses a software duplicator like Ghost might be the answer. You can always back up and restore the sticks from the portableapps menu - need to test this out. The menu also allows the user to change the name on the stick to their own name. The idea here is to create a total environment with all the tools they need including firefox extensions and favorites and just clone the master image.

PS - the other kicker in this is we could get network games like doom and quake to run and have a fragfest in the lab without the windows IT guys having a fit...we did this a few years ago with a linux live games cd but i haven't been able to find a copy since...