[FreeNX-kNX] printing

[Alastair Johnson]

Thanks for the feedback. See comments inline...

On Thursday 26 January 2006 10:18, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 24. Januar 2006 20:49 schrieb Alastair Johnson:
>-- snip note about using nomachine nxclient on the server
 >Hello,
>
> yes that worked.  After applied the patch I described in my "freenx
> problems with smb printing setup" post I got dialogs to configure my
> printer driver. It needs NoMachine's nxclient on the server which is
> generally a good idea, cause it provides some other features:
>
> 1) nice dialog window for Terminate / Suspend instead of ugly xdialog stuff
>
> 2) Suspend / Terminate buttons when you move the mouse to the title bar of
> the window that displays the FreeNX session.
>

Good to know. I'll have to try this, and have a look at your patch. Thanks.

>-- snip Martin's nice patch
>
> > So far so good(?) except that the kde print manager appears unable to
> > authenticate using AuthType Digest. I've tried in from both Gentoo and
> > knoppix, and it fails every time. You can work around this by
> > reconfiguring the client userspace cupsd to use AuthType BasicDigest in
> > ~/.nx/cups/cupsd.conf _while_the_session_is_active_ then getting the
> > cupsd to reread its config by using kill -hup on it. This MUST be while
> > the session is active because the client rewrites it at the start of 
> > every session, ad the authtype appears hardcoded into the nxclient
> > binary.
>
> Well you can change the way the CUPS config by altering a script on the
> server side. This should be the nxnode script I noted above, but I am not
> completely sure. It builds a config for the user-space CUPS and starts it.

For general use this may work. I can't test it until I get CUPS to work on the 
server though....something else to fix :-( I haven't looked into how 
authentication may propagate through the chain of servers.
For my purposes it would be better to connect to the client's cups directly, 
as discussed below.

> > All except this last bit should be reasonably easy to fix on the server,
> > and I can't see how the authentication can be a universal problem. If it
> > was the nomachine nxclient would never be able to print. I haven't had
> > the chance to do any more than this yet. I hope this helps someone to get
> > the printing going.
>
> Well as said it should be possible to let the FreeNX server create a
> different CUPS config with "AuthType BasicDigest" as a work-around.
>
> Would be interesting to know tough why KDE-Print doesn't work with
> "AuthType Digest". Maybe it works in a newer version of KDE-Print like the
> one from KDE 3.5?

I've looked to see if this is a known problem but couldn't find it anywhere. 
It doesn't help that "AuthType BasicDigest" appears commented in the default 
cups config file, so appears in almost every cups-related bug report. I also 
wondered if it might have been gentoo-specific which is why I tried knoppix. 
Have you reproduced this problem?

> I like to get that CUPS client side printing to work someday.
>
> Other solution would be a central CUPS server somewhere which talks to all
> networked printers in all rooms (maybe using a special printer VLAN) and
> having the appserver simply talk to that central CUPS server. This could
> reduce the complexity and resource consumption quite a bit:
>
> 1) no user-space CUPS has to be started, imagine 100 users with 100 CUPS
> servers
>
> 2) the user does not have to choose a printer driver

These are the reasons I would like to connect direct to the client cupsd. A 
central server isn't an option since the clients may not be in the same city 
as the server, let alone the same building :-)