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Tried TurboPrint?

There seems to be a small industry built around providing drivers for poorly supported printers, on a variety of platforms including Linux. I haven't tried this, but maybe if you need it... Turboprint.

This whole "Mac goood", "Linux baaad" idea when it comes to interfaces and usability is just mindless propaganda. Most people aren't in a position to check this for themselves because Apple is a closed off product that's not really well suited for casual exploration. You need special hardware just to run their stuff.

Well, anyone can go into an Apple Store, or ask to borrow someone's mac. Also there are plenty of hacks to get MacOSX to boot on non-Apple hardware. So that's really a canard. Anyone can check it out, you just have to want to.

So "Mac Usability" becomes a myth bolstered by fanboys that need to buy into the cult and then justify their choices.

Nice try. Just because someone doesn't bother to take the effort to find out for themselves, doesn't automatically make it a myth. I've never bothered to go to northern Canada and see if the Magnetic North Pole and Geographic North Pole are actually different, but that doesn't make it a myth.

Let me tell you my story. I ran Linux as my primary OS from 1994 to 2005. At no point during those 11 years did I ever have a system that supported all of my hardware. At no point. I used it because, I'm a unix guy. I like the shell. I like scripts. I like that everything is a file. Unix lets me do my work. That said, I am not a sysadmin. I do not like sysadmining. I do not like having to patch my kernel just let get my digital camera to work. (Incremented a hex value in a #define in unusual_devs.h so that my Sony DCF-707 would be mounted as a usb storage device.) I do not enjoy having to manually load a kernel module just to get my printer working, because it fails to be autoloaded. I do not like having a print driver that makes every photo come out pink, and then buy a print driver, only to have the photos still come out pink. (Canon i850. Printed perfectly under windows. The only think I ever used it for, well that and Warcraft III.) I do not like having two(!) different sound systems being installed, and my system still not always have sound. (I loved how I'd get "No ALSA devices found" during boot, but could only adjust my volume through alsamixer.)

Fuck. That. Shit.

I got a 17" Powerbook G4, and all my hardware worked. And you know what? I got a terminal, and X11, and XEmacs, and gcc, and everything else I wanted too. It's quite simply a better unix. (I've since upgraded to a 17" MacBook Pro.)

Linux usability? I'm sorry it sucks. It always sucked. I used GNOME during the 1x days, and it was full of incomprehensible and cutesy options. "Xyzzy Goodness = 0.42," and my personal favorite, "Clock," "Digital Clock," "Another Clock," "Clock with Mail Check." The GNOME folks couldn't say "no," and got a shit. Havoc Pennington and the rest of the GNOME "usability" team, took the message as "no options" instead of "too many options," and subsequently removed everything from the 2.x tree, in the quixotic quest to make it simple for people that have never used a computer before. (It's now 2010. It was 2001 when they started that quest. Even tribes deep in the Amazon and New Guinea had computers then. These folks simple no longer existed.) It still sucks, only now it sucks because you simply can't do the things you used to be able to. KDE? Well KDE4 is quite simply a clusterfuck

The reason why Linux usability sucks, is two fold.

1. It's hard. It's hard to do it right. It takes resources. It takes time. It takes expertise. Linux doesn't have the resources when it comes to interfaces, and everyday office software. It just doesn't. Sun is dead. Novel, never had much resources devoted to it. Usability isn't really something you can do right one weekend a m

Third party drivers? What the hell are you talking about!

TurboPrint by ZEDOnet adds drivers that CUPS does not come with.

I never ever needed a pay-for-third-party driver for the massive amount of Linux installs I did so far

You must not have run into a lot of low-end inkjets for the home market.

And Linux will NOT fail if some games are not available for the simple reason MOST Linux desktops I installed are in a corporate environment.

The article mentioned games on home installations, so I'm mentioning games on home installations.

If you're a Windows fanboy who think that USB problems mean Linux is inferior, how well does any Windows work with USB-connected drivers that don't exist? Most Linux drivers these days are reverse-engineered. A lot of Vista premature adopters are finding out what it's like to get into an environment where the drivers aren't there right now, and they don't have an OpenSource community that's going to reverse-engineer drivers.

It's like anything else Linux, if the drivers are there, there usually is no problem. This stuff has drastically improved in the last couple of years.

It used to be a bear to configure a PalmPDA... now, if you've got the software installed (JPilot or Kpilot)... you'll see a config window come up as soon as you have the program and the Palm running at the same time.

Cameras used to be a hassle. Now install Digikam and if it doesn't find the camera without help, go through a menu and hope to find a entry matching your camera. Generic mass USB storage cameras are no longer a problem. You don't even need camera software, just plug it in and wait for the prompt offering to let you open the camera's flash as a directory. A couple of years ago, I was running scripts or mounting the camera by hand.

Printers are no problem as long as CUPS has a matching driver. Just run the Add New Hardware wizard... the bad news here is that there are many printers whose drivers are not available by default, some of which have vendor supported or Turboprint-supported.

Scanners? No problem if there's a driver, you don't even have to unplug/plug them so xsane or kooka or whatever can find them. Just run your scanner program and let the software find it for you.

UPS? It's possible, but ... it's a trifle horrible.

Webcams/videoconferencing? Ask me in a few weeks, I've got an article assignment to write a how-to on the subject.

And I've got news for you if you think Canon printer drivers are going to be any better than the experience you've had...

Which experiance; Dell or HP?

I was under the impression that Cannon printers were used on Apple computers and such unlike the Dell which are Windows only.

I just jumped over to Cannon's website and picked a random model and went to driver downloads. The i950 has these drivers ready for download.

                    Add-on Module for Printer Driver (Windows Vista/Vista64)
        2006-12
                  i950 v1.62a Printer Driver for Windows XP

                  i950 v1.62a Printer Driver for Windows 2000

                  i950 v7.40 Printer Driver for Windows Me

                  i950 v7.40 Printer Driver for Windows 98

                  i950 v4.14 Printer Driver for Mac OS 8.6 - 9.x

                  i950 Printer Driver Ver. 4.1.9 (Mac OS X)
        2007-01

You must be talking about the HP.. It was only the Dell that was limited to two versions of Windows.
Cannon has supprt for Mac and most older versions of Windows. Only 95 and 3.x do not have support.

If you want to use this Cannon on linux a Google search bring up this;

http://www.turboprint.info/printers.html
The supported list includes the i950 picked out from random for testing.

Now try to find a linux print driver for a Dell Printer.

I come up with this.
"I just bought a dell laptop from dell.com and it came with a free printer. the printer is a dell 720 (color inkjet), but i cannot find any driver for it. is there anyways to make it work? i do not need to do any fancy thing, i just want it to print in colors and i would be happy."

http://www.computing.net/linux/wwwboard/forum/2639 4.html

The reply is very helpful.
"Dell printers are junk. Here's why:
1. Dell repackages Lexmark printers and sells them as Dell's
2. Lexmark printers are absolute garbage
3. Dell modifies the print cartridge bays so ONLY Dell cartridges will work
4. You can ONLY buy Dell print cartridges online, and for overpriced sums. Then you have to wait while they're shipped to you for extravagant shipping costs."

Any questions?
I have not heard these complaints for Cannon printers which is why I am considering one of them.

I run my Linux box with full multimedia, it's the machine I use to do business with. . . as somebody who currently writes Linux tutorials for a living.

I would simply not be in business if I couldn't run Linux with proprietary commercial apps like Win4Lin (which lets me run the nonFOSS Windows OS in emulation) and several other proprietary Linux apps... including the Turboprint package of print drivers that supports the Canon printer print-to-CD capability. Or at any rate, I would be in business as a Windows or Mac user, because the base Linux distro installs are NOT READY for SOHO business use.

The fact that the people who have Linux multimedia are either using Linspire style training wheels distro or are part of a l33t minority is all that one really needs to know about Linux usability out of the box. It isn't supposed to be a technical achievement to be able to watch a movie on your computer.

If the fanatics whining about Linspire were to get usable replacements for Linux proprietary apps and the Winblows legacy proprietary apps like PaintShopPro (yes, I've tried GIMP2... it is teh suxx0rs), I'd be happy to ditch my proprietary apps. I can't even use OpenOffice2.0 to do my final edits of Linux tutorials because it doesn't handle highlighting in Word document files correctly... in the way my editors expect. They can write a shitload of new drivers while they're at it, or find a way to induce the vendors to do so. [not impossible, persuading IBM/HP/other megacorps supporting Linux to lean on peripheral vendors might not be difficult]

The zealots don't get that we people who use our boxes to make a living can't wait for the OpenSource movement to get around to writing everything we need in order to make our computers function as we need them to. We don't live in mommy's basement, we work for a living. They can fix the problems, find ways to get them fixed, or STFU.

* Vendor support for Printer drivers (eg: Canon)

It's not free, but if you need to get Canon printers working under Linux, check out: http://www.turboprint.info/

Cost is minimal, and the driver works nicely.