Ubuntu, it has never been so easy

Not so much free time to write here recently, but I just wanted to share how easy things are getting with Ubuntu, and Linux in general. I can really forecast the moment when the whole idea of Linux = Geek will simply disappear, opening space for it to really scale in the market.

My post today talks about drivers, still one of the hard things to do in Linux (I mean, for "human beings").

I have two updates that surprised me with the simplicity.

1) Printers

This has always been a pain in the Linux world. First, you go buy a printer, and usually you focus on features and price, right? How about support and software? Only Windows, sometimes Mac (but still rare). When you decide to use a printer on Linux, you have to pray so that someone coded the driver for your hardware (the printer), and most of the time, there is none.

One big example is at my company, which uses Xerox network printers, with simply no support or drivers available. You can manage, with some work, to find similar drivers that will partially make it functional, but of course this is not enough (imagine if you are talking about migrating end-users to Linux... this is killer-feature). How do we solve the problem? Workaround by sending the data to a Windows machine that talks to the Xerox printer. At least it works.


At home I use HP (of course), which has people more interested in contributing to the open-source community, so you can find lots of drivers to install... but still, it was a matter of installing the driver, all that hard work... I had to do that until Ubuntu 9, very recent.

Today I had to use my printer again after a while (after iPhones and iPads, who needs paper?) so I had to install the drivers again... oops, I am lying. I didn't do a thing. Just went to:

 System > Administration > Printing

My printer just appeared there, so I added it, and that was it. All the pain, just gone. Really impressive.  If you need to use a printer in Ubuntu, try this first.

2) Web Cameras

This one here was never as hard as the printers, but lack of software for webcams were the problem, IMO. In the last couple of years, this has already changed considerably, but I never thought it would be so easy to do stuff with webcam in Linux.

So I bought this nice (and cheap) webcam with HD resolution, Buffalo BSW32K01H, and plugged it in. That is all. Even if Buffalo does not officially give support for drivers in Linux, webcams talk on a standard way to the computer, which makes it simple to give support to practically any webcam there is.

I wanted to test it out (usually use the Cheese application), but I wanted to provide a visualization through web. I ran into this post, that talks about he webcam-server, a very simple and interesting application which gives access to the camera through HTTP. Then, with a simple Java applet (already included in the package), you can build a simply surveillance system at home. I put it working and "streaming" to my mobile in less than 10 min (most of the time was spent reading the post, lol).

For my personal reference, I will leave a sample of what needs to be done:

 # install

 sudo apt-get install webcam-server

 # run it (and leave on background)

 webcam-server -v -g 640x480 -p 8081 -c Home-Cam &

 # access it

 firefox http://localhost:8081/

 # read the post if you want to implement a daemon mode (init.d)

 # and auto-refresh with java applet (also included in the man pages)