[OLPC_Boston] Printer help needed!

[Bernie Innocenti]

(cc'ing the Sugar development list)

On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 11:56 -0500, MacKenzie Sigalos wrote:
> Dear Boston,
> 
> Hello Laptop Hello World (formerly One For All) is running a pilot
> with the 4th grade students at the Cambridge Friends School. We've
> been having some issues with printing, and despite having sent out our
> tech team, we're still in need of assistance! 
> 
> The students created projects on the XO and they are trying to figure
> out how to establish a wireless connection to print them. We showed
> them how to save "Write" documents as txt files that they can open
> with Word. The package that they needed to read the .odt files (what
> "Write" files are usually saved as) on the Mac was not on their
> computers and not compatible with their OS version.  

Can you provide more information about these Macs?
On MacOS X, they may need to use NeoOffice instead of OpenOffice:

  http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/maindownload.php

Although it seems that OpenOffice 3.1 now officially supports Mac OS X
too:

  http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US

> 
> We couldn't get the printer working directly with the XO.  They have
> an HP Photosmart C4500.  According to openprinting.org it should work
> perfectly with Linux.  We installed CUPS on two XOs, but we couldn't
> get the drivers working.

The printer itself should be well supported by recent versions of Linux.
I have an HP Photosmart C4280 which works perfectly also a scanner.

If your XO is running an official OLPC build, it's an ancient version of
Fedora from 2 years ago with some modifications that make installing
extra packages somewhat harder. You may have better luck 

Even if you could get the drivers to work, there was no user interface
in Sugar for printing documents. Printing never has been high priority
in Sugar because we did not expect printers to be commonly available in
the places where Sugar is commonly being deployed. Nevertheless, there
have been some efforts in that direction:

  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Print_Support
  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Print_Support_Manual


>   Kyoko, their Tech Director, mentioned that she had tried using a
> shared printer through the Mac that they have, but it didn't work.
> She also mentioned that the school was willing to buy a new printer if
> it was easy to set up.

I don't think the problem is with the specific printer model. I'm quite
confident we should be able to install OpenOffice on one of those Macs
and print from it. I've been using OpenOffice even with an old iBook G4,
over 3 years ago.


> If you have any advice or feedback, we would greatly appreciate your
> suggestions. The 4th grade teachers are at a standstill until we can
> figure this out!

Hope it helped!

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/