Need help choosing a *nix system.

[alarson82]

I am going to get an old computer, and use it to hook up my printers to, because i have 2 desktops (1 box XP, other box vista dual booted with Ubuntu 8.04) and a vista laptop and i want to be able to use the new cheap linux box as a dedicated print server, connect to the router.

What version of linux would be best suited for that? I'm not going to have a monitor keyboard or mouse hooked to it, so i want it to be VERY stable so i don't have to constantly be restarting and hooking up equipment. and also be able to run on slower/older equiment.

 

[QuixoticOne]

I hate to say it, but in a lot of cases XP or Vista makes a better print server than LINUX -- I say that only because
LINUX doesn't even have good or sometimes ANY print drivers for various models of printers.

If your inkjet or low end laser printer or whatever doesn't have a foomatic/Gutenprint/etc. driver, LINUX generally won't
be able to serve it very well over the network. There is not generally a universally workable concept of being
able to share the "raw device" I/O so that the *remote client* has to have the printer driver and the server doesn't have
to know much of anything about the printer's capabilities.

In cases where there's a driver for a printer, often it is just an approximately correct driver that prints in some fairly low
resolution and color fidelity compared to what the printer itself supports. For something like a photo printer, typically there
are some fairly important ICC (or non-standard) color profiles and ink limits and dithering / RIP logic embedded in the
Windows/Mac printer drivers to make the printers generate full fidelity output and the settings generally depend on
the selected paper type which itself is profiled in some special way. So if you use a LINUX driver for such a photo printer
to print a color image, you'll perhaps get something that's APPROXIMATELY correct, but chances are the colors will be
notably incorrect, and the image resolution may be poor.

Other things like ink level monitoring may not work depending on the driver and so on.

However for well supported printers, and / or for very casual usages (e.g. text only or text + light graphics) output, it
may be a good solution. Certainly if you have a very intelligent "network" printer or one that speaks Postscript, PCL,
ESC/P, et. al. it may work quite well.

As for selecting a LINUX distribution -- I'd check out the latest SUSE as being a distribution that is usually fairly
up to date in terms of drivers and tool versions. UBUNTU may be a bit hit and miss as to driver support, and you'd probably
have to do more substantial manual configuration of it to get it set up as a good print server.
Fedora 9 or 10 beta isn't so bad, though I suspect SUSE may have more bundled S/W for printing.

Check for LINUX driver support here:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/

 

[sourceninja]

Our entire college campus is run from a single ubuntu print server.

 

[Brazen]

I would suggest the latest Ubuntu Server with LTS. That would be Hardy right now, which is the latest version anyway. I do use RedHat at work, instead of Ubuntu, but that is only because our hardware support and many applications will only cover tech support for RedHat Enterprise Linux.

 

[xSauronx]

Quixotic is right, *some* drivers are iffy, or crap. Some work quite well. try printing from ubuntu and see if it works well, then put the LTS server version on something.

if you setup SSH (or, if you must, VNC) you can access the server without having to hookup a monitor/keyboard etc later on and easily learn to do the small handful of things necessary to keep the print server running.

 

[QuixoticOne]

The nice thing about buying or downloading SUSE or Fedora is that you can get a DVD image that comes
bundled with most of the software you'd want, whereas for single CD based distributions like UBUNTU you'll
end up having to manually identify and download more add-on packages.
The better default firewall capabilities in Fedora/SUSE might be beneficial also.

UBUNTU should be fine if you know enough about manual sysadmin to set up the details of the print server
and firewall and whatever. If you don't know much about UNIX sysadmin, chances are any distribution will be
at least somewhat painful to setup. If you have an standards based ethernet printer, or secondarily a
standards based centronics / parallel port based one, though, it'll be pretty trivial to setup.
Proprietary / closed USB based printers are likely to be much more of a pain wrt. driver details.

 

[ultra laser]

A print server is a very simple task. Do not download a DVD worth of software for a simple task - that's nuts. I recommend using a small Debian netinstall CD and only downloading the necessary packages for a print server.

 

[citsacras]

for a linux print server i personally would recommend centOS as a first choice. you can download it free and is binary compatible with RHEL, which means you can get RPM packages for just about any product you need a driver for. Most of HPs linux packages are for redhat or suse. Other distros can work just as well, but may require more work and/or compiling drivers from source. Since you said the hardware is limited, try a minimal install without gnome or kde.

 

[silverpig]

Why don't you just get one of those routers that has a built in print server? It's done for you, it'll probably be cheaper, and you won't have to have another computer laying around.