The Windows 2000 machine that is the print server for my network has been acting really strangely lately. It tends to lock itself and it wasn’t actually configured right to be on the network. I installed NetBEUI and then the networking seemed to work but anytime any other box tries to connect to it, it blue screens with an error in the Ethernet driver (Realtek RTL8139). I haven’t had much luck finding a bidirectional USB print server so I thought I’d try installing Linux on the machine and see if I can share the printer via Samba and perhaps be reasonably happy with a modern GNOME or KDE desktop.
I briefly considered booting from a Knoppix CD and then installing it to the hard drvie to get a Debian-like system, something which I did before with another machine that I have. But after reading this warning on a Knoppix Wiki, I decided to scrap that idea and go with a distro that is meant for a hard drive install. The two most interesting distros for me were Ubuntu and SUSE. SUSE was 5 CDs though and Ubuntu was only one so I just downloaded and burned a Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) disc. I don’t mind installing a smaller base system and then downloading any of the extras that I want. Incidentally, if you don’t have a lot of bandwidth or a CD burner, you can request free Ubuntu CD’s from http://shipit.ubuntu.com/.
The Ubuntu install was quite pleasant. It runs in text mode but with easy to follow dialogs. I only got slightly stuck for a few moments trying to get it to use my existing swap and root Linux partitions but the rest was smooth sailing.
At the end, it installed GRUB so I have a nice boot menu where I can choose Ubuntu or Windows 2000.
It boots into a very pleasant-looking GNOME desktop with a fair amount of goodies installed such as Firefox and Evolution (which I have never used). Thunderbird and Emacs were surprisingly not part of the default install but you can install more packages with the nice Synaptic Package Manager.
The overall look is nicer than other distros that I have played with. Normally I find the GUI environments to be fairly ugly with unattractive fonts compared to commercial OS’s such as Windows or Mac OS X. Ubuntu seems to include some nicer looking fonts because it’s overall look seems to be much better to me.
So far I am impressed.
Now I need to figure out how to setup Samba so that I can share that printer with my Windows machines… This HOWTO looks interesting, although perhaps there is an easier graphical way to set it up in GNOME?
Ah, this looks promising too.
Check out the System->Shared folders tool. It provides a basic tool to share either folders with NFS or SMB. Works well for workgroup shares and WINS.