Saturday, May 03, 2008

The Joy of Linux

So I actually bought a printer; in fact, a printer/scanner. And I considered buying two pairs of jeans after showing up at the count with interesting new holes. Am I descending into bovine consumerism? And the obvious next step was to qualify it with the Linux Lappeh.

It wasn't quite the "And then my troubles began..." experience like the BIOS reflash in January, but I was very amused by the fact that XSANE both throws a dialog box containing the following words:
You are trying to run Xsane as root! This is DANGEROUS! Please do not file bug reports for anything that happens when running Xsane as root: YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!
and also suggests running as root as a generic troubleshooting option in its documentation. Well, I did, and all went OK. As I said to Soizick: the great thing about using Linux is that you get to feel like a mad scientist.

I recommend and endorse hplip.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ever get your sound card/Linux issue fixed?

Alex said...

Yes...

kozmcrae said...

"bovine consumerism" Rarely have I set eyes on a phrase that distills so much into such a compact and descriptive package. I Googled it immediately and came up with only six hits, of which yours was one. Sadly, but not surprisingly, none appear to have originated in the United States. The phrase fails in only one respect that I can determine. The waste from the creatures we keep and morphed into caricatures of their natural selves, is completely and easily reusable in many beneficial ways. The waste from the consumer breed of bovine is choking the planet.

I have used the analogy of dairy cattle to an industry locked-into Microsoft's proprietary business strategy in a comment somewhere. It seems to fit well.

I don't recall seeing that message from XSANE before but it sounds familiar. These are little reminders, that people, not a steel and glass corporation, are behind the development of Linux. I hope they never disappear completely.

Anonymous said...

I recently spent almost a solid week trying to get Linux to print to a Laserjet connected to a Windows machine. It seemed that there was nothing I could do to persuade a modern, CUPS-based Linux system to print to a non-postscript laser printer- - and I've been printing with Linux since 1995.

None of the supposed solutions worked - the system simply refused to send out anything but postscript. Finally I solved it by installing Ghostscript on the Windows box and setting up a "virtual printer" that CUPS could communicate with.

Alex said...

If it's HP it's almost certainly in hplip; I think it's at least semi-officially an HP project

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