Re: flexfax: Which is better for faxing from Windows - WinFlex or Samba+sharedprinter.

["Keith G. Murphy" <keithmur@mindspring.com>]

Richard Flores wrote:
> 
> Hello all:
> 
> I have just installed HylaFax on a Linux 6.0 server and now want to share
> the server with my company.
> 
> What I want to know is which is better for faxing from Windows - WinFlex or
> defining a shared printer through Samba? I have looked through the FAQ's but
> am not satisfied with the posted answers.
> 
> Any advice from someone who has been there?
> 
Richard, I've just gotten there.

I started working with WHFC, and it certainly works.  However, I was not
totally happy with the user interface, and there were other things I
wanted to make it do.  I wanted to write another print monitor like
WHFC, but there I was looking at buying Visual C++ plus the Windows DDK,
so I hesitated.

As far as going the Samba shared printer route, the missing piece there
has been anything that would prompt the user for a fax number, etc.,
like WHFC does.

Fortunately, I found a program called Respond that takes a totally
different approach.  The idea is that you print to your Samba printer,
and it is set up in smb.conf to invoke a Perl script called PrintFax. 
This script, in turn, talks to Respond on the user's workstation,
causing it to prompt for the phone number.  Winpopup is used to inform
the user when the fax is spooled (why he didn't just use Respond for
that too, I'm not sure).  The user interface is pretty nice, and it does
use a phonebook and history.

The nice things about it are:
* He provides source, so you can make modifications.
* It's in Delphi, which is an easy environment to write Windows programs
in.
* Also, because it's Delphi, it makes a standalone executable without
libraries,
   which obviates the need for any elaborate installation; I'm seriously
thinking
   about having folks just start it up off of a share on the Linux box.
* It gets you completely out of the printer monitor/driver game.
* It works!

Go here and you can get everything you need:

http://www.boerde.de:/~horstf/

It was originally meant to work with mgetty, but the lines are now in
PrintFax.pl to work with hylafax; you just need to uncomment them, and
it works like a charm, once you get it pointing to the spooling
directories you desire.