fedora-devel-list digest, Vol 1 #475 - 13 msgs

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Stuart Cheshire wrote:

>>I think one of the problems is that there are hardly any devices that
>>support Zeroconf presently that there is not much demand for its
>>implementation on Linux or pretty much any PC.
>
>>Most of the peripherals used by a home user are USB or Firewire based.
>
>And why is that? If you could buy a $50 Ethernet printer that was as easy 
>to use as a $50 USB printer, which would you pick? One of my goals in 
>creating Zeroconf was to help accelerate the trend away from locally 
>tethered devices to networked devices. Especially when you have 802.11 
>wireless on your laptop and you can use it sitting on the couch, do you 
>want to have to plug in USB cables every time you want to print, or scan, 
>etc.?

A $50 ethernet printer would be cool since most of the ones I see are 
always 200 more than the regular printer. A 802.11 would be ok until 
people started paying kids to drive by and 'fax' you the latest sales 
items. [Here kid is a device that will drive by, find wireless zones, 
configure with a half-dozen at a time, and find any wireless printers. 
It will then send a print job of our items to those printers. The 
device logs all the numbers so we have an idea of where to send you 
next week. You get paid by the number of completed printed sales and 
wireless nodes you found.]

Sorry completely off topic.

>The mdnsd daemon for Linux is written, tested, debugged, and ready to go, 
>yet it's not in any of the standard distributions. What we keep hearing 
>from application developers (like people working on CUPS) is, "We'd love 
>to use mdnsd, but it's not in any of the standard Linux distributions." 
>What we keep hearing from the people working on the distributions is, "We 
>don't know any Linux applications today that use mdnsd, so that must mean 
>there's no demand for it."
>
>There are four files: A library, a header, a daemon, and a script to 
>start it at boot time. You put those four files in, and CUPS can start 
>using it. Support of link-local addressing is not necessary for CUPS to 
>start using this, and neither is the "dot-local" gethostbyname() name 
>lookup support.
>
>I stand by my original statement: I don't understand what more I need to 
>do to convince the Linux community of the benefit of this. It runs on OS 

Because we are all old fuddy duddies who dont like being told by the 
people winning the Unix Desktop war what to do.. dang-nabbit it should 
have been OS/2.. 

>X, OS 9, Windows, VxWorks, FreeBSD, etc. It runs on Pocket PC devices 
>like the HP iPaq 5555, and PalmSource is working on adding it to Palm OS 
>6. It runs on every current network printer and an increasing list of 
>other devices, like TiVos, Roku HD1000s, etc. Why isn't it already in 
>standard Linux distributions so things like CUPS can start using it?
>

Well point me to the source, I will try to make a fedora.us RPM and put 
it in the cooker by Friday or so.


-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen at lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Lab  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645
Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --