Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded

Subject: interesting article on opensource

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http://www.catb.org/...orror.html

Hey Beko - can you upgrade my account to a developer one?

Subject: Re: interesting article on opensource

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hm.. I guess I'm to geeky to really understand this. Honestly I never messed much with cups. I always was a KDE-User and kcontrol offered a really nice GUI for cups making the configuration of a printer as easy as stealing candy from a baby. This might however be related to my choice of hardware in the first place. I always went for "real" printers like HP ones. First of all because I know that HP offers excellent drivers and second because I dislike "hardware" that needs a firmware "pumped in" on startup. This hardware I'd refer to as "win-hardware", because it's really damn hard to get such stuff running on linux _if_ the company doesn't provide drivers for anything but windows.

So.. as for me and my experience it's usually just pointing out the right "ppd" driver file provided by HP or from 3rd party driver packages installed by my distributor and hit the Test-Page button. USB or serial doesn't matter any more - no need to mention ethernet at that point

"professional" distributions even detect printers during install and thanks to many improvements (since this article was written) like HAL it's usually just plug'n'play.

There is btw a commercial 3rd party software (iirc turboprint or something like that) helping you out on this with own tools written and drivers for simple use. Cups is by the way not even the only printing system for linux - as usual you can choose what you want. cups is however a professional tool offering full printing, networking and accounting support and that requires of course some knowhow to use proper. No way around that but, as written above, no magic for a single workstation.. at least not with an eyecandy distribution like SuSE or similar

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Subject: Re: interesting article on opensource

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btw, welcome to the privileged people, jarli

Subject: Re: interesting article on opensource

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privileged like hard working?

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Subject: Re: interesting article on opensource

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I feel privileged

And hard-working.

But the specifics of the OS wasn't the point of the article - the issue was user-interface/ user-friendliness. An ideal application will have a UI so simple that anyone can do anything they want without having to research or read documentation. They point out, and rightly so, that this is why Microsoft commands the market (they understand transparency), and the free alternatives have essentially no market share.

Subject: Re: interesting article on opensource

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I agree if you add the word "optional" to GUI. I do not want a GUI for everything. I love working on a [remote] terminal because it's so much faster and I can configure everything exactly as I want it.

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