Re: [hpoj-devel] ptal-printd, and preparing for 0.7

[Joe P. <joe...@sn...>]

On Monday 18 December 2000 07:52, David Paschal wrote:

<...>
> Hi, Joe.  I decided to go ahead and add ptal-printd, because in my
> experience printing with hpoj has been a support nightmare without it.  :-)
>

This release looks like it will be a genuine improvement over the last one. 
Installation and use should be a lot easier. 


> I committed ptal-printd to CVS and rewrote large portions of PRINT-HOWTO.
> The command-line syntax of ptal-printd has changed, and I think I've fixed
> the security issues to my liking now.  Please try it out and let me know
> ASAP if there are any remaining problems.

When using the recommended options, the security of the pipe is a lot better. 
Logged in as a user, I couldn't send it data directly, but had to go through 
lpr. 

Is there any reason for ptal-printd to be started by an ordinary user? If 
not, you may want to install ptal-printd with its permissions set at 744, the 
same as lpd. After installation, I tightened up the permissions and rebooted. 
Everything still works.  

I got an unexpected result when trying to start ptal-printd without options 
from the command line (as a user).  When I used the command  'ptal-printd &'  
the options list was displayed, but the prompt didn't come back until I typed 
^C.

I added lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local that insmod the necessary kernel  modules 
and start ptal-printd with your recommend options. The system is able to 
print after a cold start without needing to do anything additional.

You may want to add a warning somewhere to not run two instances of xojpanel 
or keep it running while starting a second print job. If I forget to kill 
xojpanel first, ptal-printd dies and won't run again until xojpanel is also 
killed from the command line. That's likely to be a common annoyance for 
users, unless they just decide not to use xojpanel.

I noticed a couple of typos close together in the PRINT-HOWTO, so I ran the 
spellchecker on it. I found a total of only about 3 or 4  spell/typo errors, 
(pretty good  for most people). To save you some time, I made a patch that's 
attached below.

>
> On a different matter, I did manage to reproduce the xojpanel "no-start"
> problem, with 64 failures in 500 tries, but I haven't yet gotten down to
> root cause.  I'll put that down as a TODO for 0.8.  :-)
>

Those results are worse than mine.  The no-start problem *itself* isn't a big 
one, since it's easy to click again on the icon. Many users may not even 
notice it. In case it happens to affect something else though, it's better to 
find it (and fix if possible) IMHO. I hope it does get fixed sometime before 
0.8.

-- 
Joe