Print

The new cybercafe is due to be officially opened today. There is a meeting of the college governors until lunch time and then the people from Safaricom are coming to capture photographs and other evidence of their generosity. I have my camera ready too.

Yesterday we set up the printing service for the place, I’m rather proud of it so I’ll describe it here, forgive me for not holding back on the geekdom.

The computers that our customers use have been installed with the Adobe Generic Postscript Printer driver, which we had to download from Adobe because Windoze doesn’t include one (!). This is set to print to a printer on our Linux Samba server, but this printer does not physically exist, once the Samba server spools the postscript data for printing it runs a script, that I wrote, which copies the file to a queue directory for the machine who sent it. The queue directories are shared on the same Samba server so that the cafe administrator can browse to them from her computer. She can open and examine all the print files because we have installed Ghostscript and GSView on her computer. From this she can print selected files to her local printer.

This lets her preview and delete the print jobs which seems to be important here because people print things for which they don’t want to pay ten bob per page. She can verify the number of pages and content with them before commiting to paper and, thereby, money.

Only problem is that **one** of our supposedly identical, out-of-the-box new PCs will not allow us to log on to the Linux server. We have tried everything, including setting it to use plaintext passwords, but it just gets rejected as having sent a bad password. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.