[LINK] Moved to Linux

[Craig Sanders]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 04:18:23AM -0400, rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au wrote:
> The combination of a dead PC and the painfulness of trying to get MS to 
> okay moving the Windows license to a new machine has beaten me, so this 
> is written from a new machine running Linspire.

an interesting tale, but i think you chose the wrong distribution.  IMO
you would have been better off with one of the community-supported
distros (debian or debian-based like ubuntu or Fedora).  Linspire has a
proprietary/commercial focus which, amongst other problems, limits what
they are willing to include or support (more options means more complex
and expensive support).


> With that beaten, we turn to the question of printing. The HP2600n has 
> no Linux drivers, so there was an awful lot of fiddling. Again, the 

i think you might be mistaken there - i don't know the printer myself,
but if you are talking about the HP Colour Laserjet 2600n then
linuxprinting.org says that it is "mostly supported".

http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-Color_LaserJet_2600n

linux support is provided by the "foo2hp" driver:

http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_driver.cgi?driver=foo2hp


> attitudes of experts leaves a lot to be desired: since there's no "real" 
> drivers, you can use 'this' driver set (download, compile, and install 
> from horrible instructions) or do without.

use a decent distribution (e.g. debian or ubuntu) that includes cups and
foomatic, and the driver will be available in a package, no compilation
required.



> Apart from that, the upsides to Linspire so far:
> 
> 1) Install was fast. A dream: this is how installation should be. 
> Nothing went wrong, no during-install reboots, just brilliant.
> 2) Networking required no effort whatever beyond plugging in the cable.
> 3) Everything else works as it should, with no more challenge than 
> double-clicking.

all this is pretty much par for the course with linux distributions
these days. it's not unique to linspire, not by a long shot.



craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)