In the digital world it seems like we’re always having to convert paper documents into a digital format. Whether it’s scanning old pictures to save as digital images or scanning important documents to save in PDF format, a scanner has almost become a necessity for any home workstation. Ubuntu provides the XSane application to interface with most of the scanners available. This section walks through the things you’ll need to know to get the most out of your scanner and Ubuntu.
Detecting the Scanner
Before you can start using your scanner you need to ensure that XSane can work with it. Here are the steps to do that:
1. Connect your scanner to your Ubuntu workstation, then turn on the scanner.
2. After starting Ubuntu and logging in to your desktop, start XSane by selecting
Applications -> Graphics -> XSane Image Scanner. The XSane splash screen appears, allowing you to select the scanner.
The opening splash screen displays a list of the scanners XSane detects that are connected to the system, along with a default scanner.
3. Select your scanner, if it has been automatically detected.
4. The XSane workspace opens, with four separate windows We’ll talk more about each of the windows in the XSane workspace a little later.
5. Click the Acquire Preview button in the Preview window. Your scanner should automatically start up and begin scanning the document. When the scanner finishes scanning, the document should appear in the Preview window display area.
If you can see the scanned document in the Preview window display area, you’re ready to start using XSane..
Detecting the scanner is often the hardest part of using XSane. The XSane program is a graphical front end for the SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) commandline utility, which detects and interacts with scanners based on a standard interface protocol. Many scanners have interfaces written to interact with SANE, but there are still those that won’t work. Although there are many types of scanners available, they break down into five basic categories, based on how they connect to the workstation:
• Parallel port scanners: Parallel port scanners connect to the LPT1 printer port on a workstation. These scanners are notoriously slow and often use low-resolution scans.
• SCSI scanners: The small computer system interface (SCSI) is a popular interface for older scanners. Some scanners come with their own SCSI card that you must install in the workstation to connect the scanner. The key to using SCSI scanners is that Ubuntu must detect the installed SCSI card. For the more-popular SCSI cards this isn’t a problem, but SCSI cards that often come with older scanners can be an issue.
• IDE scanners: Some older scanners require an integrated device electronics (IDE) connection on the workstation. This is the same type of connection that most hard drives and CD drives use. If your scanner connects directly to the IDE port on your workstation, you may have to purchase a separate IDE card to support it.
• USB scanners: Most modern scanners connect to the workstation using a standard universal serial bus (USB) port. Ubuntu automatically attempts to detect USB devices connected to the workstation, and it often configures the scanner as a USB device before SANE even starts.
• Network scanners: Network scanners use proprietary software on Windows workstations to detect and connect to a scanner across the network. The Windows software used for this connection usually doesn’t have a Linux counterpart. SANE has its own network protocol for sharing a scanner connected to a workstation on the network with other workstations, but it can’t connect to network scanners that use a proprietary protocol.
The best source for SANE scanner information is the SANE Project web site at http://www.sane-project.org. Select the Supported Devices link to search for supported scanners.
Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets
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You can modify the properties of any printer on the system, whether Ubuntu automatically created it or you manually created it. If you double-click the icon for the printer you want to configure.
The window on the left contains five main properties groups that contain printer information you can modify. The main groups are
• Settings
• Policies
• Access Control
• Printer Options
• Job Options
Some printers contain a sixth group for setting specific options for the printer.
Settings
The Settings group provides some basic settings you can change for the printer. From here, you can change the description and location tags for the printer, the URI of the printer, and the PPD file used for the printer. There are also three other buttons that you can use:
• Print Test Page: Provides an easy way for you to test whether the printer and PPD file are working properly.
• Print Self-Test Page: Some printers support an internal self-test page. If your printer supports that feature, this button will be enabled.
• Clean Print Heads: Some printers support an external command to clean the print heads. If your printer supports that feature, this button will be enabled. That covers the general settings for the printer. The other groups provide more advanced settings.
Policies
The Policies group contains three separate sections. The State section allows you to control the state of the printer:
• Enabled: Lets you take the printer offline if there’s a problem.
• Accepting Jobs: Allows you to temporarily suspend processing print jobs.
• Shared: Allows you to set whether the printer is a shared resource on the network.
There are four policies (or rules) that control printer behavior. Two of the policies control banner pages for print jobs; the other two control how the printer operates.
There are two operation policies that you can set:
• Error Policy: Determines how the printer reacts to an error in the printing process.
The choices are Abort-Job (giving up on printing the job), Retry-Job (trying again after manual intervention), or Stop-Printer (preventing all other print jobs from printing). The default value is to retry the job because the problem most likely can be resolved with an easy fix, such as turning the printer on or setting it as online.
• Operation Policy: Determines the mode the printer runs in. At this time, the only setting is default.
Banner pages allow you to print a special page describing the print job. The Starting Banner page prints out before the print job. This option allows you to print a cover sheet for the print job. Theoretically, it’s supposed to provide some privacy, blocking people from seeing the first print page on the printer, but, really, who wouldn’t just look under the banner page? There are several banner pages you can choose from.
The Ending Banner page allows you to print a page that signifies the end of the print job. If you’re in a high-volume printing environment, using a starting or ending banner helps keep everyone’s print jobs separate. In a workstation environment, it’s pretty much a waste of paper. The default is to not print either of the banner pages.
Access Control
The Access Control group provides a method for you to restrict access to the printer. There are two ways to do this. First, you can list every user account that the server will prevent from using the printer. This option means that any user not on the list can print and that any user on the list can’t print.
The second method is to list the user accounts that are allowed to use the printer. This option means that only the users on the list can print. Obviously, which method you choose depends on whether you have more people you want to allow to print or to restrict from printing.
Be careful when setting this feature. Notice how the two radio buttons are labeled:
• Allow printing for everyone except these users.
• Deny printing for everyone except these users.
If you click the Allow Printing radio button, the user accounts you list will be denied access to the printer—and vice versa for the Deny Printing radio button. That’s just a bit backward, if you ask me!
Printer Options
The Printer Options group allows you to set some physical properties for the printer. The properties available for you to modify are based on information provided by the individual printer’s PPD file and depend on the physical characteristics of the printer. These properties are divided into separate categories, depending on the printer’s capabilities.
The General settings handle properties such as types of paper the printer can handle,
print qualities it can produce, and number and types of input trays. You can force the
printer server to request a specific paper size for all print jobs or to request which paper
tray to take paper from.
The Printout Mode settings control the default print quality used by the printer. Again,
these settings depend on the capabilities of the particular printer, but usually there’s a
range of dots per inch (dpi) and color settings to choose from.
Job Options
Finally, the Job Options tab allows you to set the default properties for print jobs sent to the printer. When you request an application to send something to the printer, a standard GNOME Print dialog box appears.
You can select several printing properties for the specific print job, such as whether to print in landscape mode, how many copies of the document to print, the paper size to use, and so on. If you prefer to use any of these settings by default, you can set them in the Job Options tab. Many more print job options can be specified. The job options are divided into four sections:
• Common Options: Sets common printer options, such as number of copies, page orientation, and number of printed sides (for duplex printing).
• Image Options: Sets imaging options such as scaling and hue adjustment.
• Text Options: Sets features that affect the printed text, such as characters per inch, lines per inch, and margins.
• Advanced Options: Allows you to set options available for a specific printer. The complete list of options appears within the Printer Configuration Properties window.
If you decide to revert to the default setting for an option, click the Reset button, and the option will return to the default value.
Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets
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One amazing feature of Ubuntu is its ability to automatically detect printers connected via USB cables, parallel cables, and even serial cables. If you have one of these printers, you most likely don’t need to add it to the system. You should already see an icon appear under the Printers window. Just move on to the next section to configure it. If you are not fortunate enough to have your printer automatically detected, you’ll have to manually add it. Here are the steps for doing that:
1. Click the New button on the toolbar. The New Printer wizard appears and lists your printer options. Before the New Printer wizard appears, the Printer Configuration tool scans your workstation and the local network for any accessible printers. If it detects any, they’re added to the top of the connection list.
2. Select the connection type of the new printer. Although the printer is defined as a local printer on your workstation, this utility also allows you to configure six types of printer connections (besides the currently connected printers) to make a printer available to the system. As you select each connection type in the left side of the window, a different Properties area appears in the right side. For example, if you select Windows Printer via Samba, text boxes appear where you can enter the printer name, a userID, and a password to access the network printer. Click the Browse button to browse your local network to locate shared printers. After you’ve selected the connection type and changed any Properties settings, click Forward to continue with the wizard.
3. Select the printer manufacturer or the location of the PPD file. Ubuntu uses PostScript printer description (PPD) files to format files for printing. PPD files are based on the same concept as the standard printer drivers you’ve probably used in Microsoft Windows. Each printer must have a PPD installed for CUPS to know how to format text and graphics sent to the printer. This wizard window allows you to select the PPD file to use for the new printer. You have two options:
• Select the printer manufacturer from the list of installed drivers.
• Install your own PPD file for the printer.
If you’re lucky enough to have the PPD file for your printer, copy it to a location on your workstation and select the Provide PPD File option. Browse to the location of the file and select it, then click Forward. If you don’t have the PPD file for your printer, you’ll have to hope that Ubuntu has your specific printer make and model defined in its library. If you find the printer manufacturer listed, select it and click Forward.
4. If you selected a printer manufacturer, the next wizard window provides a list of specific printer models and PPD files. Select the printer model and (optionally) the proper PPD file. This wizard window asks you to select the specific model for your printer. Hopefully, your printer model will be listed. If not, you must go back a step and find your own PPD file to install. If your specific model is listed, select it, and a list of available PPD files is shown. Some models may have only one PPD file, but others may have two or more files to choose from. In that case, one is usually marked as recommended. Try that PPD file first. If it doesn’t work, select a different PPD file. Clicking the Forward button takes you to the final wizard window (some printer drivers also have an optional window, which appears before the final wizard window, for setting individual options).
5. Define a printer name for the printer, and add the optional description and location if you want to include more information about the printer.
6. Click Apply in the Summary window to finish adding the new printer.
The new printer is added as an icon in the Printer Configuration window (even if you mapped to a remote printer). You should now see the new printer when printing from applications on your system. However, before getting too carried away with printing, it’s a good idea to check how the printer is configured.
Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets
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Even though technology gurus keep predicting a paperless society, for now we’re stuck having to print some things out. In the past, printing was one of the dark areas in Linux. Trying to get modern printers working with Linux was a challenge. However, recently there’ve been some amazing advances that make Linux more printer friendly. Possibly the biggest advance in this area has been the common UNIX printing system (CUPS). CUPS provides a common interface between UNIX (and Linux) systems and printers. It runs in the background as a service, connecting to any defined printers and waiting for applications to send print jobs. Because it runs in the background, CUPS can communicate with remote printers and accept print jobs from them. Ubuntu provides a simple tool to access and set up the CUPS server running on your workstation. The Printer Configuration tool provides a graphical interface to add, configure, and remove printers on your Ubuntu workstation. This section describes how to use the Printer Configuration tool to manage your workstation printers.
The Printer Configuration Tool
The Printer Configuration tool provides an easy way to configure the CUPS server running on the system and any printers you’ve defined. Selecting System -> Administration -> Printing from the desktop menu starts the Ubuntu Printer Configuration tool.
There are two things you can configure from the Printer Configuration window:
• Server settings: Allows you to set features controlling how the CUPS server manages system printing features.
• Local and network printers: Displays icons for all of the printers defined on the system and allows you to change individual printer properties on them.
The following sections describe how to use the Printer Configuration window to set the CUPS and printer properties for your system.
Printer Server Settings
Selecting Server -> Settings from the menu bar in the Printer Configuration window produces the Basic Server Settings window.
There are a few different settings you can play with here to help out with printer administration:
• Show printers shared by other systems: Displays printers found by browsing the network.
• Share published printers connected to this system: Allows local network clients to connect to any of the local printers marked as shared.
• Allow printing from the Internet: Allows remote network clients to connect to any of the local printers marked as shared.
• Allow remote administration: Enables remote clients to connect to the CUPS server running on this system.
• Allow users to cancel any job (not just their own): By default, users can cancel only their own print jobs. Enabling this feature allows any user to cancel any other user’s print job. Although this is a handy feature, it can be dangerous in a multiuser environment (especially if your users like to play tricks on one another).
• Save debugging information for troubleshooting: By default, the CUPS server generates a moderate amount of logging information to monitor printer use or problems. If you’re having trouble with a specific printer configuration, you can enable this feature to produce more (lots more) information in the log files. After determining the settings appropriate for your CUPS server environment, you can add and set up individual local printers.
Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets
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The most basic of all DNS services provide the ability for a client system to send a query to the DNS server, asking it to return the IP address of a host system. This type of resolution is referred to as forward name resolution. DNS provides this functionality by hosting resource records that specify the IP address for each of the host systems within the DNS namespace. The namespace is referred to within the DNS server as the zone. For instance, if your DNS namespace is zygort.lcl, and you have a server named APFS01 with an IP address of 192.168.29.75, your zone name would be zygort.lcl and the server would have a resource record that tied the name APFS01 to IP address 192.168.29.75. When a client sent a query to the DNS server looking for APFS01.zygort.lcl, the DNS server would reply to the query with a response containing the IP address.
This is the most fundamental purpose of DNS, and probably the most utilized function—finding an IP address when a client sends a query. There is another resolution type known as reverse name resolution. Reverse name resolution allows a client to query for a host name when it knows the IP address of the system in question. This works in much the same way as the caller ID system on your telephone. When you receive a phone call, the phone number corresponds to a “friendly” name that you may recognize. Since it is much easier to remember names than a long numbers, this makes it much easier for you to determine exactly who is calling. If a name is not associated with the phone number, then only the phone number will appear. There are several programs and utilities that use reverse name resolution, and you may find it beneficial to make sure you have the correct information included within the zone.
DNS servers will resolve queries within the zones that are configured on them. You can have more than one zone on a server, and the server will accept and respond to queries for records in those zones. When a client sends a query for a zone that is not hosted on the DNS server, the DNS server has to perform additional tasks to respond correctly to the client. The DNS server will search all the way to the top of the DNS hierarchy, known as the root, for help. These root DNS servers are listed within the Root Hints tab of the DNS server’s properties page. The DNS server will send a query of its own to one of these root servers, asking for resolution. The root servers will refer the DNS server to the appropriate TLD DNS server. The DNS server will then query the TLD DNS server for assistance. The TLD server will refer the DNS server to the appropriate second-level domain DNS server. This process will continue until a DNS server with the resource record resolves the request, either with a successful lookup or a failed one.
There are problems that can be encountered with the typical DNS resolution methods. First off, not every namespace is accessible from the Internet. Our zygort.lcl is a prime example of that. If you were to perform a lookup on a server name within that namespace using conventional DNS methods, the lookup would fail. There needs to be another method of resolving the DNS queries for these zones. The other problem lies with companies that do not want their DNS servers to query outside of their organization. Because DNS servers look to the root of the Internet as the de facto starting point for name resolution, in this case you need a way to keep them from doing so. New options have been introduced to address these issues.
Windows 2000 DNS servers introduced forwarders to the Microsoft DNS world. Using forwarders, you can specify another DNS server that will attempt to resolve queries when the local DNS server cannot. By default, a DNS server will use the DNS servers that are configured within the Root Hints tab of the DNS server’s properties page. If your DNS server cannot reach the root servers or if you want to control the servers that perform the iterative queries from your organization, you can enter the server’s IP address within the Forwarders tab on the properties sheet for the DNS server. Once configured, the queries that cannot be resolved by the DNS server will be sent to the first DNS server listed in the Forwarders tab. Sometimes when you define a forwarder, the DNS server identified as the forwarder will have to take on the task of resolving all the queries outside of the DNS server’s zones. This can be a considerable amount of traffic. Another problem occurs when the forwarder does not have the ability to query for certain zones. Windows Server 2003 introduced another method of forwarding: conditional forwarding. Using conditional forwarding, you can specify a DNS server that will be used to resolve queries based on the domain name in question. For example, if a user needs to resolve an address for zygort.local and if a conditional forwarder is created for the zygort.local domain, the DNS server will send a recursive query to the server specified within the forwarder setting
For more information on conditional forwarding, see the TechNet article 304991 at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=304491&product=winsvr2003.
Another item to note: if a DNS server is configured as the root server for the organization, you cannot configure it to forward requests to another DNS server. If you have a DNS server configured to forward requests to another DNS server, simply delete the root zone from the DNS server, which is specified by the dot (.). In the case of a Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 server, the root zone is designated by.(root. Once the root zone is deleted, you can enter external root servers into the root hints and can configure forwarders. This “root zone” behavior does not occur within a Windows Server 2008 DNS server when you promote the first domain controller. This doesn’t mean that you need let Dcpromo install the DNS service; you could configure the DNS zone first and then promote the domain controller. Doing so will allow you to configure the zone the way you want and then allow the domain controller to register. There are other considerations to take into account if you create the zone first when promoting the first domain controller for your forest, and we will discuss those options later in the chapter. First and foremost, if you create the zone manually, make sure that you configure the zone for dynamic updates; otherwise you will receive an error message stating the domain is not configured.
Source of Information : Sybex Mastering Active Directory for Windows Server 2008
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Windows 7 is the successor to Windows Vista. As such, it takes its place as the latest corporate desktop and workstation upgrade, and also sets its sights on the home office and even home entertainment/gaming console, as Microsoft did with its ill-fated Windows Vista. This time, though, Microsoft has gotten it right. In fact, we’re sure you’ll really grow to like Windows 7 as you use it.
The goal Microsoft set for Windows Vista was quite ambitious. That probably explains why it took Microsoft so long to get it to market. During development, more and more features worked their way into Microsoft Vista and the project became increasingly unwieldy. The code kept ballooning, and the process couldn’t be stopped. This pushed out the delivery date of Vista, first to 2005, then to early 2006, and finally to late 2006.
Worse, when Vista did appear, its reception was lukewarm at best, and customers complained long and loud about their preference for Windows XP, even as it remained an older, less-attractive interface with more security problems. Even six months past its January 2007 public release, it was clear that Vista wasn’t attracting widespread adoption. To satisfy a continued desire for Windows XP, Microsoft ended up trying to fix Vista while simultaneously working on XP Service Pack 3 (released in mid-2008).
In an attempt to convince customers that Vista was better than its industry reputation, Microsoft remarketed it as “Mojave,” a campaign that highlighted the many superb features of this system. It didn’t work, so plans for a follow-on to Vista were accelerated. That successor is what has been released as Windows 7. Think of Windows 7 as “Vista, fixed” and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how it compares to both Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Many of the most important improvements in Windows 7 are under the proverbial hood, including dramatic performance improvements and a far greater level of reliability over a similarly configured Vista system. Enough history, though! Let’s talk about what Windows 7 is and is not. Following in the footsteps of Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition, Windows 7 comes in six flavors (perhaps more, if versions without Internet Explorer are created for the European market as with Vista):
• Windows 7 Starter (available only pre-installed on netbook class PCs)
• Windows 7 Home Basic
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Windows 7 Professional
• Windows 7 Enterprise
• Windows 7 Ultimate
As with Windows Vista, Windows 7 flavors benefit from being very much the same under the hood. Recall that between 1993 and the release of XP, there were very separate home-oriented (Windows 3.x/9x/Me) and corporate-oriented (Windows NT/2000) Windows versions with drastically different internals. A common core for all Windows 7 versions makes program and device driver development much easier because device drivers and software programs need to be created only once, not twice.
Vista’s design mandate was a tough one: to create a more-secure, flashy-looking, reliable, easy-touse operating system with functionality ranging from an excellent gaming and home entertainment platform all the way to a full-blown highly secure, mission-critical business networking machine. Vista needed to be more attractive, more capable, and much more robust than XP; incorporate all the latest technologies; and be far less susceptible to attack from viruses, phishing, spam, and the like. Malware has kept legions of IT professionals in business, but it has grown nightmarish for all Windows-based IT departments.
Vista succeeded for the most part, but at the price of performance and compatibility. That’s where Windows 7 comes in. Thus, for example, many of the apps previously included in Vista are now in a separate Windows Live Essentials bundle available online, including Windows Calendar, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Mail.
Unlike the completely reworked user interface (UI) that we saw when making the jump from XP to Vista, Windows 7’s UI is quite similar to Vista. Windows 7 adds enough nuances to deliver a better computing experience, but enough basic similarities that if you’ve used Vista, you’ll be ready to go instantly. If you’re coming from Windows XP, however, you might be surprised that many of the menus XP users have grown accustomed to are gone, replaced by a much more web-like view of the computer, with phrase-like links that imply their functions—for example, “See what happens when I press the Power button.” Vista also included the option of switching to a “Classic” Start menu, but Windows 7 axes that. If you move to Windows 7, you’ll need to get used to the new Start menu, even if it feels a bit odd at first.
Windows XP was designed for application and hardware compatibility with products made for older versions of Windows, even MS-DOS games and graphics applications. Windows 7, like Vista, carries this same compatibility over in its 32-bit versions, but Windows 7 64-bit versions have abandoned that legacy. The time has come to put those old dogs to rest. There are ways around this, using Virtual PC, for example, so you don’t have to jettison your favorite Windows 9x or DOS programs in Windows 7 64-bit versions.
If you’ve worked in the Windows XP world, you’ll also be glad to know that Microsoft listened to its customer base and added a Windows XP compatibility mode that you can install into some Windows 7 versions (Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate) to run your favorite Windows XP programs. At some point in the future, Microsoft’s vendors will upgrade these apps and Windows XP will take the Big Sleep, but until then, this will doubtless be a lifesaver for many.
Source of Information : QUE Microsoft Windows in Depth
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