Joe Blog's A Day In The Life Of Your Average Joe

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) & Airport Extremes

Now - I know some of you probably hate Apple...I don't, clearly. So if you do, please don't come and post comments about how much you hate them, I won't approve them

So with that out of the way, on with the post. I've just installed Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) this evening, and in the process of setting things up, I realised I'd never installed my printer on Jaunty (9.04). So I figured I'd give it a go, wondering if it would be as easy as when I installed it on all the other PC's & my MacBook - as it's connected to my router (the airport extreme), it's shared using bonjour, which I happen to really like, it does mean setting up the printer is much more simple, and a lot quicker than normal.

I'll be honest - my hopes weren't very high, I figured that since it's an Apple developed technology, and not open-sourced, that I would have a hell of a time trying to get it to work. I was totally wrong. I did configure it slightly differently, in that I opened http://localhost:631 in Firefox to set it all up via the CUPS web UI. I chose "Add Printer" and it scanned for connected printers locally and networked - I sat waiting for it to finish, and tell me that nothing was connected....

I'm sure you can imagine my surprise, and curiosity, when it returned my printer under "Network Printers". I continued with the setup, expecting it to throw back an error of some variety, but no, it all installed fine. To make sure I wasn't just daftly pointed and clicking things that looked relevant, I printed a test page.....which I now have on my desk next to me - chalk one up for Ubuntu!

Overall, having run Karmic for all over 2 hours now - I'm already very impressed, and I'm looking forward to the final release.