Insights for a quick and easy Ubuntu printer installation

For a long time, setting up a printer in Linux has been somewhat challenging. But, it's been getting easier and easier. And today, setting up a printer in Ubuntu as simple as it gets - this article is firm evidence!

This also follows on previous printing advice found here.

We bought an Epson Stylus D68 today in fact, after searching for it in http://linuxprinting.org/printer_list.cgi and seeing that it worked. The description was that it "mostly worked" but we can't find what _doesn't_ work on it.

We weren't using Ubuntu, but stock Debian. Literally three clicks using the browser-based CUPS interface and it worked. not a single thing needed to be installed. Test prints work from Opera, Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp, KPDF..

If you're thinking of buying a printer for your desktop, see this page: http://linuxprinting.org/suggested.html

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting

This is the BEST tutorial to learn bash scripting, which in turn is one of the best programming languages out there. I highly recommend it to anyone who uses linux. Bash scripting is at the heart of it all.

SSH tricks

The article describes in a human language some of the powerful, yet very useful (even for total newbies) capabilities of OpenSSH, such as passwordless login, automatic execution of commands on a remote system or even mounting a remote folder using SSH.

Three problems with this article:
- Most people use SFTP, not SCP.
- It's easier to tunnel a Samba session (if you really need to) than to install and use SSHFS.
- They didn't mention the "-D" option, which in conjunction with tsocks allows you to tunnel any application through the encrypted connection, whether it has support for SOCKS or not.

SFTP is perhaps the next step for users that upgraded from FTP access to a hosted web server, but I suspect most ssh users have migrated from the r commands and are using scp in place of rcp.

Comparison...
http://winscp.net/eng/docs/protocols#protocol_comparison

My favorite tool though is rsync. While I use rsync over ssh, I never understood why ssync wasn't created to do this job...

SSH is great for tunneling BonJour/DAAP:
http://www.shokk.com/blog/articles/2006/02/06/getting-ipods-and-itunes-everywhere

Now, if only there were a light daap client so I could avoid starting up iTunes...

Ssh is also really neat as part of an ANT script - so you can use all these neatness for your java deployments and automation.
http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/index.html