I've been using linux as a server for a long time and decided to setup a workstation. I installed RH8.0 and OpenOffice 1.1 on an older AMD 650.

Here's my problem and so far I can't find an answer on OpenOffice.org or anywhere else:

OO uses spadmin to setup printers, what's odd is printers added thru the printconf gui do not appear on the list. It maintains it's own (very outdated) list of printers. This appears to be a very poor design / short coming of OO. Why would any application require printer setup?

Does anyone know how to merge the default system printers (including remote printers) into OO? I have to believe there is a way to use lan printers o/w OO is useless in an office environment.

Thanks.

The problem an office application is facing is that traditionally
there was/is no *STANDARD* for printing in Unix/Linux. You
have huge varieties of printing systems, also, even though most
printing in Unix' is done via Ghostscript, there's NO guarantee
that it's going to be installed on every machine people might
want to use OO on. Therefore I believe that OO's approach
is valid enough.

However, it's easy enough to use network based printers, too.
At work for instance I installed CUPS on my Slackware box,
and I could either print to the network attached printers directly
(which from the admins viewpoint is a big NO-NO ;}) or using
an lprng-queue on one of our BSD machines through CUPS
which is what I am doing.

All you have to do is to set the command in spadmin to be
(for my cups that is ;}) to lpr -P <queue-name>

You might want to look at Linuxprinting and Cups for more info.

HIH

Cheers,
Tink