I'm the closest zIWE has to that cluless newbie gramma.
Heh.. I lucked in to getting CUPS even *started*. Via CLI.
(in Greg's fine burn of Herr Knopper's massive smorgaasbord).

IIRC (and it's getting fuzzy already..) that was due to the happy accident of there being something like a startcups.x or ~ equally suggestive of its potential usage. How did I find that?

By surfing through the various directories, starting from /.
Certainly there was no 'help' in the sparse 'Help' locales / placeholders for "future filling". Nothing I read even MENTIONED obliquely - how you might start CUPS or anything else.

That I was next able to make use of a running CUPS at all, was due to the supplied GUI Printer (selection?) option; with CUPS running and then choosing of a driver via this GUI feature, magically: it printed a test page. That part of the GUI worked. [Hey - nothing about assigning a PRINT QUEUE even came up.. Who Knows what might have happened if I'd actually tried to print a couple things bigger than the Test Page ???] as in

The "Queue type" screen gave me no clue about the existence, nonexistence, or sharable status of any print queues on my network.

'Course too.. I didn't even have a network setup: a thing which *nix could also easily have *determined*.. but I'd still need a fucking queue, now wouldn't I? Oh and about that "cups login" -- well, maybe here it's due to the wisdom of Herr Knopper, that the GUI printer setter-upper didn't require me to worry pretty little head about That; never mentioned it. Guess Herr K. also handled:

So, let's review. In order for the nice, user-friendly autoconfiguration stuff to work, you have to first edit an /etc file. On a different machine than the one you're trying to set up. You have to read the comments in configuration file to know that you need to do this in the first place.

(Or that didn't apply re a non-networked box [?])

Skills needed? merely 10 yrs [now 10+ years in past] of casual CP/M, DOS, how to navigate a fucking hierarchical file system + guesstimate of W.T.F. *might* start a task running.. which isn't.

No cold newbie would have the faintest about Any of these (basic) ideas, nor have a prayer of doing Anything CLI. (Why did I need to manually start CUPS, when the fucking message informing me that "CUPS was not running" on my initial foray into 'choosing a printer': could as easily have invoked the 'start cups' executable! or AT LEAST told me there WAS such a thing!!)

Hey, I'd have to start sleuthing from this same point, next time I wanted to print from Knoppix (had I not added the switches to save setup to floppy, etc.). Which I hadn't.. just then.

Not a show stopper por moi, but YAN indication that - as in this rant by ESR - that *exactly* this mindset, menus never *tested* by ordinary unwashed folk: is the norm for what I've seen so far. More understandable when using CLI; inexcusable once there's anything purporting to be a G. "USER" Interface!

Maybe it's anathema for *nix folk to study the Beast aspects which built their empire: as ESR suggests here. So long as it is this way, why the dread discoverability deadlock shall occur just often enough to send the average sheep right back to that warm fuzzy defective pasture. I could add my own list re the plethora of nested config files and the Twenty Questions one needs to ferret out via MAN (or whatever POS can be found hidden somewhere Else) -- all distracting thoroughly from whatever simple AIM one began the sleuthing FROM.

ie if there are no (or just very few) of those volunteer folks who enjoy explicating via uncommonly Good English - for the intelligent but non-techno savvy: why should this ever get any better? Coding is so much more Funner; screw the documenting - that's kid stuff. Sure it is.


moi