[Sugar-devel] [OLPC_Boston] Printer help needed!

[Martin Sevior]

Write also allows you to save the documents as "rtf" which can be
openned by almost any word processor available for Macs.

Cheers

Martin


On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 8:36 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> (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/
>
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