OS wrote:
>
> I have to agree with FunGoYom. It is my opinion that one of the major short
> falls of Linux is lack of printer, scanner and camera support. It is no use
> just saying 'buy a printer that does run with Linux'. I have all three of the
> above devices and not one of them works with Linux. And as for the idea of
> booting into window$ just to print, surely that simply defeats the object.
> Moreover, you can e-mail the manufacturers until you're blue in the face, as I
> have, and you either hear nothing back or get a polite 'get lost' reply.
>
Good points. There's work going on within the Linux community to better
support all these devices, but we all need to keep hounding the hw
makers and application developers to support Linux.
> Linux is probably going to have to bite the bullet and support non postscript
> printers (please don't tell me about ghostscript !) directly, parallel port
> scanners and a better range of digital cameras if it to really succeed with
> 'joe public' (please don't tell me that Linux is not for 'joe public', I really
> don't believe that).
>
By "Linux", who do you mean? Maybe Redhat or some other co will see
enough need for this (i hope so), or maybe they will be happy in
serverland where these things are less of a problem. I don't think
Linux really is for Joe Public yet. There's a very strong M$ current
out there, and only advanced swimmers can go against it without
drowning. But that's changing quickly!
What's wrong with ghostscript? It's a great solution. Browsers, word
processors, etc all can save/print as Postscript. The postscript output
can be viewed onscreen, or converted to a number of raster formats. It
seems to me, that ghostscript would be the place to add winprinter
support. I don't think putting postscript2winprinter conversion in the
kernel would be a good idea ;-}
> I am a software engineer, and I have done protocol decoding in the past, but I
> simply don't know where to begin with driver development,
If you have a device which "almost works" with Linux, jump in and see if
you can fix it up!
> Please reply sensibly :)
Sensibly,
Adam
