Linux

[Jon Knight]

On Fri, 16 Aug 1996, Edward Wigg wrote:
> Printing works nicely enough from Linux/Netscape, especially to a networked
> postscript printer with a suitable print server, but we, like many/most
> people are moving in the direction of charging for printing. Whether or not
> there is a simple way to integrate unix style printing into most vendacard
> printing systems is open to question. I don't know if anyone has done any
> research into this; it may be a non-issue, but it is one more thing to worry
> about.

We do all our charged printing via HP-UX machines (HP's UNIX flavour).  
The charging system runs under a secure Oracle server and is tied into 
the normal UNIX printing mechanim.  This means that "trusted" UNIX 
machines (ie: ones that Computing Services know about and trust the 
sysadmins of) can submit print jobs to the central HP printing service 
and let them do the charging.  Staff and students buy credits in advance 
of wanting to print (staff actually get a fixed number of free credits 
everyday in order to perform their normal work - they just pay real money 
for specialist laser printing services such as colour or A3)

> Linux will mount DOS floppies, and though there are scripts that will allow
> non-privileged users to mount/dismount a floppy, I see no easy way to
> explain people used to DOS that you cannot just insert/remove a disk without
> mounting/dismounting it as well. Maybe there is some clever work around for
> this that I have not discovered -- perhaps leaving the floppy permanently
> mounted and having a cron job flushing writes to it regularly would suffice.
> If all else fails it would probably possible to write a special device
> driver that mounted the disk only for the duration of the write, but it's
> well beyond me :-). 

We use mtools on the Linux box in the office and that lets you mcopy, 
mdir, etc, etc without mounting the floppy as a UNIX accessible 
filesystem.  Works well for us (modulo the duff floppy drive on that 
machine... :-) ).

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *