Re: Alternative OS
Russell Coker wrote:
>>However, when I was looking for a color printer, nobody had heard
>>of other operating systems (eg Linux), and I had to purchase
>>something at my own risk and hope that it would be compatable. Even though
>>compatability lists are often made available, these are very often
>>out-of-date and/or inaccurate.
>
>These lists are inclusive not exclusive. So if something is in the list then
>it works and will always work. The only problems are in the case of the lates
>t
>and greatest new models.
Sometimes these lists are completely out-of-date (ie if you look at the
ghostscript printer compatability list, I don't think you can purchase
many, if any, color printers mentioned there anymore, as they have been
replaced by newer models). Also, sometimes hardware is listed
as being compatable, when it is badly supported or no longer supported or
requires major hacks in order to get it to work properly.
>This is changing though, now that most of the big companies offer Linux
>pre-loads you can count on it working with their hardware. I expect that when
>I need a faster ThinkPad I'll be able to buy one with Red Hat pre-loaded. Thi
>s
>will be really handy as I'll know that the hardware works and I will be able t
>o
>use the Red Hat configuration files as samples for setting up Debian.
This is good, but still doesn't help if you want to add a printer/scanner
to an existing computer.
>As for buying on faith. The solution is simple, test the hardware with a
>laptop. With peripherals such as printers most shops are happy to turn them o
>n
>and let you plug your laptop in for testing (at quiet times anyway). If anyon
>e
>wants to buy such hardware in London and needs help in testing Linux
>compatibility then they can email me and I'll be happy to meet them at a store
>in the central London area to perform such tests on my laptop.
At one shop I went to, I thought I could do something like that. They
agreed with me, however I didn't have the disks with me at the time. The
next day, they said there must have been some mistake, they can't let
me test the printer without purchasing it, as that would mean opening
a printer box, and use an inkjet cartrige. We got into an argument as
to why they weren't going to support non-MS operating systems, but they
found it very hard to believe that Linux != MSDOS. "This printer is not
MS-DOS compatable, therefore it won't work... You are more likely to
get the next model up to work". I think they meant it wasn't backward
compatable with dot matrix printer standards.
Eventually I got better support when I contacted the printer company
directly: Both the printer I wanted and the printer this shop
recommended use a newer protocol that is incompatable with the prevous
printer, hence it "probably" will not work with Ghostscript. Don't ask
me why they changed the protocol, as the previous one was advertised to
be "resolution independant", etc.
I got sick of all of this, and decided to purchase a printer on the
assumption that I could run Ghostscript on Win98 with the Windows
drivers, and currently this works fine. Eventually I will try fiddling
around to see if any native ghostscript drivers work for this printer,
but as I don't print that often, it is not a big issue.
I think most shops (that I have been to), and some manufactures are best
equipped for selling equipment in bulk and don't want the hassles of
worrying about technical support. Even when I do have serious problems
with hardware under Win98, no one seems prepared to help "no one else
has experienced that problem, it must be a problem with your computer."
This was when my scanner software performed "an illegal operation on
startup". I think it may have been incompatable with some other piece of
software also installed on the computer, but don't know what. I had
to reformat the harddisk and reinstall everything from scratch to fix
the problem.
After I forced the technical details of the crash on the technical
support operator, he denied that this program was written by that
company in question, despite the company name being embedded into the
program name.
Its attitudes like this in the commercial world that attract me
so much to free software.
>>Sales people often make the assumption "if it doesn't contain drivers
>>for your OS" then it is not compatable! I don't want new drivers that I
>>probably would have to manually integrate and compile (and hope it works
>>OK), I want to use the existing drivers in the Linux kernel, ghostcript,
>>whatever.
>>
>>I do not know any way around this problem though :-(.
>
>Educate them. Tell them that you use Linux and you don't use the Windows
>drivers that come with the hardware - but Linux comes with the drivers for most
>hardware. Tell them that Linux is the fastest growing server OS and that they
>should know and care about whether the products they sell work well with it.
>Tell them that major companies such as IBM support Linux and that if they have
>a problem with supporting Linux then you'll take your business elsewhere and
>recommend that everyone you know does the same thing. Tell them that you don't
>run MS software and tell them the reasons (lack of support, low reliability,
>high cost, lack of source so you can't fix all the bugs, etc).
>This is what I do.
In that case, you seem to have more luck then me. The people I speak
to don't want to be educated. Typical responses include (something
like) "no-one else has ever had your problem before" and
"If this Linux is such a great product, it will have a technical support
telephone number. It is their job to know what hardware their program
supports, not ours."
I have no idea how to reply to any of these in such a way that won't
make Linux look bad... I think they failed to grasp the idea that
not all software is of commercial nature.
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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