Slashdot Mirror

I use Mint too for most of my stuff (oldish but still good Lenovo W520): Eclipse IDE+Java, LibreOffice, Audacity, various browsers. Java + web programming, watching videos, listening to music, presentations and some documentation, Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects...

I've heard good things about the Xanadu distribution from people that previously used Mint (also Debian/Ubuntu parentage). Have not tried it myself though.

I don't disagree with other people that recommend Ubuntu or plain Debian - maybe try them all out?

Caveats:

Hardware may still be an issue, depending. I recently needed a scanner and went for the cheap but good Canon LIDE 220 (The SANE project shows complete compatibility). Even so, setting it up required some extensive googling for instructions. Even so, the proprietary Windows software has some nice, time-saving extra functions (e.g. detection of edge of picture, corrections, OCR, etc) so for a certain scanning task I'm busy with I still boot to Windows. Before you get ANY peripherals, make sure they will work with Linux (not always easy). Then again, most USB mice, keyboards, external drives and memsticks, as well as Bluetooth devices and Ethernet/Wifi devices just work. As do the earphones :-p

I may sound disloyal, but I still think MS Word is a very good program (as compared to Libre Write). Sure, simple docs with basic styles go well in Write, but for more serious layout and better looking graphics, I still fall back to MS. Other power(ish) users may feel the same about PowerPoint and to a lesser extend Excel.

Some small things like settings etc. are not obvious. Coming from a Windows environment, I often think "this used to be able to be changed in the controll panel" - but nothing similar on Linux. So lots of googling for instructions... Then again, someone probably has already asked "how do I do XXX on Linux?"

The standard interface does not always have all the polish that you may be used to from Win or OSX. Mostly it doesn't get in the way.

If you have Win-only software that you NEED to run, Wine may work, or it may not. Not always easy.

The main problem I find with getting help is that there are a lot of people providing help that are only slightly less clueless than you, so sometimes help you from bad to worse (or the step-by-step instructions don't work as well on the new version, but if they would just explain the concepts behind those instructions, any reasonably intelligent person could probably figure it out.)

On the positive side, I like:

Free - no money

No "telemetry" (but be sure about your chosen distro)

So fast as compared to Windows on the same hardware, even running the exact same installation (e.g. Eclipse)

Mostly just works - simplicity has its benefits as compared to all those bells/whistles/effects and handholding popups...

Posted AC because of some specific details in post.

There are probably plenty of edge cases that have an XP driver and no Linux driver at all. Does SANE support the Microtek ScanMaker 4850 flatbed scanner yet? It appears not.

Do newer versions of Windows support your old hardware? Probably not. There are a ton of HP devices that were fully supported in XP but in anything newer get only "generic" support if anything - most features of the device (scanners especially) not available unless you boot XP in a VM and run the HP software there. I had that problem in Win7 with HP Scanjet and Deskjet models - granted, 10 years old - and did the XP Mode workaround. So fundamentally upgrading Windows isn't much different from switching to Linux - either way you're screwed with regard to your existing peripheral devices.

Linux has a Dramatically better hardware support than XP,Vista,7 or 8 has combined.

Dramatically better on the whole? Perhaps. Better for every particular device? Not necessarily. There are probably plenty of edge cases that have an XP driver and no Linux driver at all. Does SANE support the Microtek ScanMaker 4850 flatbed scanner yet? It appears not.

Well, I guess I today get to be the semantic web nazi, but here goes... Hyperlinks should flow nicely along the text and not be words like "here" or "this". This is how I would tweak your message:

actually, it seems like it does from this Amazon review of the printer
The drivers from Epson website are also looking to be fairly compliant and is registered as a SANE backend.

actually, it seems like it does from this review here
The drivers from here are also looking to be fairly compliant and is registered as a SANE backend.

Glad you like it! As for scanners, I bought my first one secondhand on amazon for $45. It served me throughout Uni for the next 5 years, until I got a new one (it came as a 2-for-1 deal with a new printer). If that is beyond your budget I have seen them be thrown/given away (especially old parallel port ones), and a lot of them work well with Linux.

If Linux support is a must, have a look at: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html

Yeah.. My site, like the rest of my non work life, is out of date and broken (the counter no longer increments, and it doesn't load properly, breaking the site). I am in the process of rewriting the backend, but time is short.

Thanks a lot, hopefully times will get better soon, and then I can devote some proper time to personal projects again :)

Good luck with your attempts to find a scanner as well!

And unlike Windows, you can download the LiveCD free

It's not exactly free if one has to pay the telco $7 (at $10/GB) for the 700 MB overage.

and legally

Not if someone tries to assert Raenex's interpretation of GPLv2 against Canonical and other distributors of Linux operating systems that include non-free drivers. Any non-free software included on the same disc is part of the same "collective work", and under this interpretation, the exception for "mere aggregation" applies only to private use, not to distribution of copies to the public.

boot it

Provided that the showroom where you're ordering your PC (e.g. Best Buy) lets you bring in CDs from outside and boot them on the hardware in the showroom as part of making the decision as to whether or not to buy a particular PC. And in a lot of cases, you won't be able to test everything, such as WLAN support, because the showroom's manager explicitly declines to provide free public Wi-Fi.

Indeed, most users will find that the hardware that stopped working because HP or Canon or some other similar asshole didn't update the drivers from Vista to Windows 7, or because HP or Canon or some other similar asshole has explicitly locked out your hardware from running on your new OS, even though the current driver speaks the protocol that your scanner uses, because the new model uses it too.

That works in many but not all cases. The Microtek ScanMaker 4850 is still unsupported after years. But if you were already considering buying a new printer, such as if the manufacturer has discontinued ink for your printer model, I agree that HP is a safe bet.

Pretty good, but for years, I had to reboot to Windows to scan with a Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner. It's still unsupported to this day. I eventually replaced my scanner when I replaced my printer with an HP OfficeJet all-in-one, and I chose HP solely because of HP's commitment to CUPS and SANE under Linux.

SANE always worked for me back in the day

My experience differs. I installed Linux on a partition years ago, and it turned out that there was no SANE driver for a Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner. Several years later, as of today, it's still unsupported. It's hard to "watch what you buy" when peripheral manufacturers are not in the habit of putting a penguin on the box or even mentioning Linux at all in the system requirements on the back.

That has nothing to do with the discussion here which is about adopting Windows paradigms for unix desktop software.

GIMP is also Windows desktop software. The UI layer of Windows desktop software SHOULD follow the behaviors that users of Windows desktop software expect of Windows desktop software.

the last donated perperials I recieved was a scanner (does not work on windows above XP), 3g dongle (does not work on windows above vista) and a printer (does not work on windows above xp), all of which worked fine under the latest version of Kubuntu -- out of the box.

I tried to switch to Mandrake with a Microtek ScanMaker 4850 scanner that several years later still has no SANE driver. My aunt just moved, and now the wireless router has moved from the room with her oldest son's Ubuntu box to a different room, and Ubuntu doesn't recognize a spare USB WLAN adapter that the Windows PC now in the same room as the router used to use.

Well, there is the internet.

Response from the internet: Unsupported. If you meant use the web to rule out incompatible products before you buy them, that has three problems: stores that don't provide a web terminal to customers, hardware received as a gift, and hardware kept when upgrading an existing PC from Windows to Linux.

I have a scanner and a video card that both came with Windows CD's yet will not work on Windows 7.

They work with the versions of Windows that are listed on the box: probably Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The boxes for scanners in Best Buy doesn't list any version of Ubuntu.

Both of those hardware devices are humming along perfectly with Ubuntu 10.04 no CD required.

I haven't been as lucky as you. The scanner I bought for use in Windows (Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB) turned out to be listed as unsupported in SANE, a component that all major desktop Linux distributions share, when I tried to switch to Linux. It's still unsupported.

it is trying to install Vista or 7 on hardware you've already had for a while.

CPU, RAM, and disk requirements already tend to block upgrading to a new major version of Windows. (Windows 7 is a minor version in this case.)

Or even if it does work, it often means hunting down drivers from several websites

At least the websites exist and have drivers for some version of Windows, which can't necessarily be said for Linux. See a SANE example.

Ubuntu fits on a single CD and gets all my hardware going, on first install, almost every single time.

So what do you do when you install Ubuntu and find that it doesn't recognize one or more pieces of hardware that worked with your Windows install? I'm talking about, for example, a SANE-incompatible flatbed scanner. Or by "my hardware" did you mean the hardware that you had already hand-picked for compatibility?

New DVD burner, [...] dual wide-screen monitors, digital camera, Razer gaming mouse, USB SD/Compact Flash/etc. card reader

These are all standard device classes (ATAPI, DDC, USB mass storage, USB HID, and USB mass storage respectively) that need only the class driver that comes with the operating system. Of what you listed, only video cards and internal modems need specific drivers. I'd add scanners, sound cards, and printers to the list. I bought a Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner back when I used only Windows, and SANE's web site acknowledges that it's a paperweight under Linux. And even though dial-up is almost dead, Wi-Fi cards have driver issues much like internal modems did *cough*Broadcom*cough*.

http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-mfgs-cvs.html#Z-HEWLETT-PACKARD
really ?
note, i'm a linux user myself, and i have looked at sane devices list quite a lot when trying to determine which scanner to purchase several times before.

I'm planning to try making one of these into a scanner server. It could potentially turn any plain old USB scanner into a network-attached scanner, using the vast array of SANE drivers available.

Initially it should be very easy just to run an instance of saned, which lets SANE frontends talk to the backend over a TCP socket. A more ambitious project would be to combine the SheevaPlug with a web-based SANE frontend... the only one I could find was phpSANE but it seems to be a dead project...

Name your genre and I'll game you some games supported either by Wine (out-of-the-box, no extensive modifications unless a very detailed tutorial is available online) or within Crossover.

Try these:

• Platform fighters, like Smash Bros. series
• Party games, like Mario Party series and WarioWare series
• Music games bundled with professionally produced, properly licensed music, like Parappa the Rapper series and Guitar Hero series
• Video game construction kits in the English language, like RPG Maker 2 and Fighter Maker 2
• Stylized social simulations of country life, like Animal Crossing series and Harvest Moon series
• Arcade-style racing with weapons, like Mario Kart series

Not that I'm saying Windows succeeds at these genres either. They're just what the kids I babysit play, and I'm trying to get away from a gaming platform that's even more closed than Windows.

I've managed to run all my peripherals without a problem. Let me know what you're using

Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner. SANE has listed it as unsupported for years.

***Sane supports most of the more common brands of scanner, provided they don't rely on funky things like parallel ports.*** No, unfortunately, it doesn't. It supports some devices well, many after a fashion, and many not at all. The list of supported devices is here: http://www3.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html I use Linux almost exclusively because a decade of supporting Windows PCs left me with a deep and abiding disgust with that once promising OS gone sour. In my experience, most peripherals are fairly well supported under Linux although it takes the miracle of ndiswrapper (a wrapper around the Windows drivers) to use some wireless interfaces. Scanners are an exception I think. If the problems aren't too bad, being able to run in Linux and switch painlessly to Windows for rarely used peripherals and jobs like US income tax preparation that are iffy under Wine, could be a viable alternative for many of us.

As long as you followed step #0. Check printer compatibility here and scanner compatibility here. Unless they got a Tux logo or something, because there are still devices that don't have Linux drivers. I agree, when it works it works much better on Windows and most things work, but a two minute googling may still save you a lot of grief. Plus, there's nothing wrong with supporting manufacturers that really have first-class Linux drivers.

I'm pretty sure that SANE drivers are completely independent of the Linux kernel. At that point, you're not really making a Linux-related comment at all. I've used SANE to great success on a whole variety of *nix platforms.

Scanners
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html

wireless NICs
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Devices/USB

digital cameras
http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php Note that any camera that works as a USB storage device (most these days) will work also.

3D video cards
AFAIK, there are no sites anymore, but all current cards along with any card AGP, PCI, or PCI Express card made within the last 5-8 years or so that have ATI or NVIDIA chipsets will certainly work on any x86 Linux PC with the appropriate slot available. The support for many on-board video cards that are not NVIDIA or ATI, such as the popular VIA Chrome9 and Unichrome chipsets is available, but the support for it is sketchy at best unless you're willing dive into CVS or SVN repositories and grab in-development drivers. Even then, last I checked (about 6 months ago), these drivers were unstable as hell.

other hardware
check the forums on http://linuxhardware.org.

This list is hardly complete. In the next week or so, look for me to compile a more complete resource guide and post it at http://rob.shinn.googlepages.com/ . I'm doing it because I get tired of answering questions like "Where do I go to find out what [printers|scanners|alien mothership interfaces|...] work on Linux?"

For one thing, the Linux kernel has more drivers BUILT IN than Windows includes with their OS distribution.

As I understand it, the drivers included with Linux tend to be for old(er) hardware, as opposed to hardware for sale new in box today. When a new, binary-incompatible revision of an 802.11* card comes out, it comes with a Windows driver disc, and there's significant lag before the Linux module for that card is updated. Worse, some hardware never gets a driver that runs under Linux, and if the make and model that I happen to own lingers at "unsupported" for years, all the manufacturer can say is tough shit.

so most of your hardware with the exception of the very newest hardware, should work.

Except one can't easily buy anything with a manufacturer's warranty other than "the very newest hardware".

Printers and scanners, are supported by "drivers" that are NOT part of the kernel at all. Your glib reference to CUPS (printer drivers) and SANE (scanner drivers) doesn't even make this suggestion at all.

This only illustrates the public's confusion between Linux the kernel and *Linux the operating system. I don't care that drivers for inkjet printers and flatbed scanners work in user space; I just don't want to have to install more RAM, a virtual machine, and Windows XP just to print or scan something while running Ubuntu.

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

1. Install your favourite flavour of GNU/Linux

I understand that companies might be hush-hush about works in progress, but how did this article get published without even naming the one completed driver that this program has yielded? I know Greg K-H didn't say what it was, but someone could have at least asked him.

It would be extra nice if the Plustek OpticBook 3600 was on that list, but somehow I doubt it.

Define working... There is now an experimental backend in the SANE CVS tree, but I've not had chance to try it here yet. Debian packages appear to have this backend too, so it is possible it will work. There are sources around for standalone utilities now too, so it hopefully wont be long before it does. Maybe you could donate some time to the project, or offer your beers (or cash?) to the main developer of the experimental backend? http://www.sane-project.org/unsupported/canon-3200 f.html

http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html

I would like to be able to scan from our multi-function printer to any of the computers in my house.

Have you looked into the network options for Sane on Linux? I have a HP PSC 2400 shared between 10 computers in my office. Scanning is shared via Sane and printing is shared via Cups. It works out really nice.

I want to use Firefox 3 to upload a drawing that I scanned. So where do I get a Debian driver for my scanner, which is still listed as "unsupported" in the SANE HCL? This must be why you're kidding.

A case can be made for the value of Vista being $0, because that's the price of a substitute product.

I'll guess that your "substitute product" is Ubuntu Linux or some other popular GNU/Linux or *BSD operating system. But imagine a piece of hardware that has a working driver for Windows NT series operating systems but no driver for Linux *cough* 4-digit Microtek scanners *cough*. The price of the substitute product would have to include the price for a substitute for the hardware as well.

A scanner can take more time, but it's worth the effort. Kooka works as well as the best Windoze software with them and you can scan in several photos at once. The quality, at all resolutions, is better than the camera method. It takes time to split them up, but you can save that task for later. With proper equipment layout, this can be almost as fast as the tripod way. You can find tough old HP scsi scanners at used computer shops and buy them for a song. Many USB scanners also have good sane backends. See the list of sane devices before you buy.

The easiest thing to do, is to use a photo scanner like this. I'd rather use kooka than a script but scripts are flexible and powerful.

Grab yourself a $40 USB scanner. Stick it on an old PC, and install your favorite GNU/Linux distro. Then use SANE and scanbuttond to bulk-scan your photos. Here's how I am doing just about the same thing:

I inherited my grandfather's QSO cards (W3FFZ) from the 50's. I figured I'd scan 'em and put 'em on the web. For the scanning process, I have scanbuttond run my script to scan a postcard size from the scanner, and toss it into a directory. So what I do now, is I go over to the scanner, put a QSO card in, close the lid, and press a button. The scanner scans the card and I can then flip it over and press the button again.

It is difficult to bulk-scan things in general. You really need to apply meta-data to your images, whether you populate any comment fields, the way you name your files, etc. I find it best to go through and rename my images as I take them out of my camera/phone.

I asked you to name a card that was no longer supported, since your original contention was that a lot of older cards aren't supported anymore (that is, of course, absolutely not true). Since there are few or no current cards (probably none) that aren't supported by X, getting a video card for use with Linux consists of just walking into the store and picking out one you like.

I'm beginning to suspect you of trolling, since your answer is about as non-sequitur as if I'd asked "What color is an apple?" and you'd replied "Moose."

You have a BSCS degree and you're out here griping out scanner support in SANE? You probably could have written the driver in less time than you've spent complaining about in on Slashdot :-)

I don't know where you live that you have a BSCS degree and can't get a job (the fast food thing I understand; if I were a fast food manager instead of an IT manager, I wouldn't want to hire anybody with a CS degree either; I'd figure they'd be gone at the first chance to get any kind of computer job), but if you live in Winnipeg and can read Korean (speaking isn't necessary, just reading), I may have one to offer you. Sorry, I know the odds are long on that, but I'm not trolling, I really do have a job opening for a Korean speaker in Winnipeg. Well, you don't have to actually speak it, just be able to read it well.

As to how you would go about contributing to the SANE project, I guess you didn't look very hard:

They have it linked on theirwebsite. Since you're a programmer and you have a (probably) unsupported scanner, I think contributing code to make it supported would be a much better donation than the scanner itself or cash.

Best wishes with your scanner. And your bitterness. When I was one of the "some people" instead of just bitching, I did something about it if I could, or waited on someone else to do something about it if I couldn't. But I don't get bitter, it helps no one.

Those which run under Linux probably wouldn't require new hardware either.

Find me a Linux driver for my paid-for yet unsupported Microtek Scanmaker 4850 flatbed scanner, which was purchased long before I thought of switching this computer to Linux, and I'll believe you. Unless you are working with a computer that was built from the ground up for Linux, including buying a printed copy of a distribution's hardware compatibility list to carry with you to the computer store, I am 90 percent sure that you will have issues with at least one piece of hardware if you switch a computer from Windows XP to a common Linux distribution.

And what about vertical-market proprietary software intended to run on the same computer, which is either available only for Windows or (if you're lucky) available for multiple platforms but priced such that using multiple platform versions in an organization is cost prohibitive? You would have to use Wine (significant overhead and less than full compatibility) to run your existing licensed software for Windows on a Linux box.

What does [promotion in traditional media read by management] have to do with anything?

It's the same reason most listeners prefer payola'd major label music to independent music: repeated exposure builds familiarity.

I have seen relatively few MS Office, OO.o, or Corel WordPerfect ads either.

Which magazines and which TV channels are you looking at? In the news magazines and cable news channels, I see a whole bunch of advertisements for Microsoft Office software.

People giving away software usually don't spend money to ensure you'll take it from them.

Then why doesn't Sun advertise its StarOffice software, the official commercial distribution of OpenOffice.org? Or by "giving away software" do you also mean "we're practically giving it away", that is, budget software?

saned will allow remoting for any scanner supported by SANE, not just USB ones -- and it makes advanced scripting and such very easy. (Further, the SANE API is dirt simple to code for, so if there isn't already a tool that does what you're looking for it's easy to write or adopt one).

saned will allow remoting for any scanner supported by SANE, not just USB ones -- and it makes advanced scripting and such very easy. (Further, the SANE API is dirt simple to code for, so if there isn't already a tool that does what you're looking for it's easy to write or adopt one).

Just use a simple bash script and SANE. If your scanner has adf then it's even better.

According to WaSP (the people who wrote the Acid2 test), [Browser not for Microsoft Windows] passed first, followed by [a second browser not for Microsoft Windows] and [a third browser not for Microsoft Windows]. [...] That makes Opera the 4th browser to render Acid2 correctly.

It also makes Opera the first publicly available web browser that renders the Acid2 page correctly under the Microsoft Windows operating system. This is important if you don't want to have to re-buy your PC (in switching to Mac OS X, which runs only on Apple hardware) or your peripherals (in switching to Linux, where SANE still doesn't support my flatbed scanner). Or is Konqueror for Cygwin/X considered stable yet?

It would appear not. At the very least, it is not included in SANE in either the internal or external backends. For that matter, no Planon scanner is.

The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux

Or they have tried Linux and have had hardware whose driver successfully installed on Windows fail to install on Linux. I tried Mandrakelinux 9.1 when it came out and it found my ATI Radeon 9000 video card (but failed to start X), found my Canon S520 inkjet printer (but printed everything at 60% size because it misdetected my 600 dpi printer as a 360 dpi printer), and completely failed to find my Microtek Scanmaker 4850 flatbed scanner (which is still listed as unsupported in SANE).

"You should have consulted the hardware compatibility list before you bought the hardware." Even before I knew that I wanted to switch to Linux? Even for hardware received as a gift?

LiDE 35, 40, 50, 80 are officially unsupported by sane but work is in progress to support them. A standalone program has been written, which can scan from an LiDE35 under linux. I gather this is serving as a guide to supporting the LiDE 35 (and others) under sane. Support for the GL841 chipset, used in the LiDE 35, is already in the development version of sane.

I would imagine that complete support for the LiDE series in sane would be a matter of someone rolling their sleeves up and writing the LiDE 35 specific bits (based on the test program) on top of the sane GL841 driver.

LiDE 35, 40, 50, 80 are officially unsupported by sane but work is in progress to support them. A standalone program has been written, which can scan from an LiDE35 under linux. I gather this is serving as a guide to supporting the LiDE 35 (and others) under sane. Support for the GL841 chipset, used in the LiDE 35, is already in the development version of sane.

I would imagine that complete support for the LiDE series in sane would be a matter of someone rolling their sleeves up and writing the LiDE 35 specific bits (based on the test program) on top of the sane GL841 driver.

LiDE 35, 40, 50, 80 are officially unsupported by sane but work is in progress to support them. A standalone program has been written, which can scan from an LiDE35 under linux. I gather this is serving as a guide to supporting the LiDE 35 (and others) under sane. Support for the GL841 chipset, used in the LiDE 35, is already in the development version of sane.

I would imagine that complete support for the LiDE series in sane would be a matter of someone rolling their sleeves up and writing the LiDE 35 specific bits (based on the test program) on top of the sane GL841 driver.