Dan's Taking Some Lumps

Fellow Daynoter Dan Seto writes of some problems he's running into using Xandros Linux as his desktop OS:

I have two problems to report in using Linux.

The first involved printing an Adobe Acrobat file. The file began as a WordPerfect file emailed to me from another worker. The file was then forwarded to another person who, I believe, inserted an image of their signature into the file, converted it into an Acrobat file and emailed that back to me.

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The second problem is using my scanner. I have a Visioneer OneTouch 9120 USB scanner. However, there does not appear to be a Linux driver for this scanner. I checked out the SANE scanner site and found Visioneer is not supported. I checking other sites and it appears that it comes down to I am out of luck and should instead buy an Epson, almost any Epson. The moral of this story is check the SANE project site first before buying a scanner for Linux.

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In reply I noted that for me, printing under Linux has consistently been a massive PITA for me. I've previously written here why I switched Bagend over to Windows XP Pro from SUSE 9.2 -- basically it was printing, but also the need to run apps to program my ham radio.

When it's finally time to replace Bagend, I'll be getting a Macintosh. Mac OS-X gives me the best of both worlds: BSD UNIX for when I need to do geeky stuff, plus an absolutely killer, easy to use GUI, in which everything I need to do just works. It costs more initially but pays for itself in lack of wasted time and aggravation.