Re: [LUG] Warning - Any Mandriva Users Out There!!! A Rant.

2009/5/3 Brad Rogers <brad@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

On Sun, 3 May 2009 12:05:41 +0100 (BST)
Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Gordon,

> Hm. Now wifey has an HP scan/print unit connected to her XP desktop,
> it's a Photosmart 2575 scan/print thingy and I'd quietely ignored
> until now, (I have an HP4600 colour laserprinter which eats
> postScript) when after a quick look at it, I find an Ethernet socket...
> So maybe I'll have a look at hplip now...

HPLIP works with parport, USB and ethernet printers. The Debian package
seems to not have parport support compiled in, but since new printers
don't use that, it's almost a non-issue now.

> A quick search finds:
> http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html
> So there's hope!

"A New Hope" perhaps? ;-)

> Indeed - and I'd forgotten about the multimedia stuff too. (I don't
> play DVDs though and too used to some of my old ways!)

Hobson's choice for me; If the TV is in use by wife and/or kids, I
can't watch a DVD, since that's where the player is. SO, I have to
watch on the computer.

> The one package you may need, even if not playing DVDs is w32codecs.

Which I neglected to mention.

> Debian is the purest of pure when it comes to obeying the FSF rules,
> but here in the real world, it's not always possible to stick to them
> - certianly not in the desktop world yet though.

OTOH, there are some real DFSG zealots out there. They simply won't use
anything from anywhere other than "main" and "contrib". No "non-free",
debian-multimedia, etc. Of course, it's their choice to make.

--
Regards _
/ ) "The blindingly obvious is
/ _)rad never immediately apparent"

Thanks very much for all of your replies. I tried a number of distros - Debian 5, Mepis 8, Zenwalk and Suse 11.1. I couldn't get PC Linux OS to boot on my laptops although this could have been down to a scratched dvd rather then the OS installation. I thought that they all were very good in different ways but, decided to go with Suse 11.1 in the end. It was the easiest to install and enabled me to do all that I needed to without any "twiddling" (extra configuration needed).

Due to my problems, I decided in addition to set up a bootable pen drive that I could install with everything that I needed and could use if something like this every happened again. I used the pendrive linux site (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/) that includes utilities for setting up a bootable Linux pen drive from Windows (I haven't finished re-installing Linux yet). I tried Kubuntu (which was really good but, a bit slow) and another just called Pen Drive Linux (which is based on Mandriva).

In spite of the problems I had with Mandriva, I chose Pen Drive Linux as it runs very quickly from a slow pen drive, has good hardware detection and is very easy to set up. If any of you haven't used this site, I thought it was great and think an emergency pen drive installed with all that you need is a very good idea. There are a lot of different distros available on the site with full instructions for installation.

Viv