Stealth Desktop III

Eduardo Sanchez from Open for Business has been running a series this summer called The Stealth Desktop, and it essentially details his experiences in installing and using Slackware. The third entry, Managing Users, Fonts and Printers, has just been posted.

I’ve been looking forward to his next entry for a while, mainly because I’ve been working with Slackware myself and have come to enjoy working on it more than Fedora on my desktop machine. His tips have been beneficial, and his current article is very timely as I’m getting ready to work on printing on my laptop next.

Also, this current entry is not completely Slackware-specific. While Sanchez discusses the specific impact on Slackware, the actual tools and utilities he describes for user, font and print management are all KDE tools. Specifically, he covers KDEAdmin, the user management tool, the KDE Font Installer, which he also compares to similar tools on other distributions, and the KDE Printing System control module.

Finally, he covers how to set up the KDE printer in non-KDE applications. I set up CUPS on my own prior to reading this article, and defined a printer in the CUPS admin page, which then appeared in the KDE control module. However, the printer did not appear in OpenOffice.org or Mozilla. One simple tweak to the printers in the given application and voila, I’m up and running.

Even if you’re not using Slackware, you may want to give this article a read. It’s also helpful if you’re using KDE and are less than satisfied with your current distro’s customized utilities.