I almost reinstalled my OS today. I have a Brother HL-5250DN series laser printer, which I keep in the other room hooked straight into the network. From my iMac and MacBook Pro, I have it set up through ZeroConf, known there as Bonjour.
On my Trisquel box, on the other hand, I wasn’t able to set it up no matter what I tried. I searched the package manager for zeroconf and installed what seemed to be the right packages, but still nothing, and I tried searching for a solution, but didn’t find anything I needed (it doesn’t help that my distro’s forums are in Spanish).
So, I downloaded and burned Ubuntu 9.04 and backed up my files, anticipating a reinstall. Then, as I’m talking to Joshua Rogers, it dawns on me that ZeroConf is called “avahi” on GNU/Linux, just as it’s called “Bonjour” on Mac OS X. So I searched for “avahi,” installed a few packages, reopened the printer config panel and, lo and behold, there it was.
Considering that, protocol-wise, ZeroConf == avahi == Bonjour, did it have to be so confusing?
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12 Comments
Zeroconf is the protocol; Avahi and Bonjour are the names of the software implementations of that protocol on their respective platforms. Think of it as sort of like how Firefox, Opera, and Safari are all software implementations of HTTP. It’d be rather confusing to call them all “HTTP”.
True… still, I wish the packages had been better labeled. If I want an FTP client or server, it doesn’t take long to find a good one.
BTW, I just remembered to add you to my blogroll.