tlug: Printer Drivers: gs vs win95

[Scott Stone <sstone@example.com>]

On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, Kei Furuuchi wrote:

> negative compromising statement that GS driver is inferior to Windows
> one in over all
> printers in Japan. Instead I should have suggested some proposal

Basically this is true for many of the popular printers in Japan.  If you
have an HP inkjet or laserjet, gs works great.  PostScript printers also
work great.  The problem you run into is with some of the popular Japanese
non-PS laser printers, and some of the popular japanese inkjets, like the
Epson Stylus.  YOu can fix that by simply compiling in the gs driver (it's
not, by default...), but it does take some tweaking, etc.

OK, so now that we've admitted that Win95 is better at handling certain
kinds of printers than linux/gs is, let's talk about WHY:

1.  Printers come with win95 drivers.  Note the lack of Linux support from
the hardware manufacturers.

2.  Linux distributions are limited to gs 3.x, due to that painfully
stupid Alladin copyright that prevents us and other distributors from
putting newer, better versions of ghostscript into linux distributions.
Sure, you can get it yourself, but that can be a PITA, esp. with compiling
things.. ESP since this whole libc5/glibc change thing is still happening.
Once everyone's using the same libc, things may be a bit smoother.


Anyhow, let's try and avoid future anti-Win95 flame threads, or actually
any flame threads at all, since that fosters the wrong attitudes and is
contrary to the purpose of TLUG (as I understand it anyway :) ).  I, too,
use Win95 often, since I'm an avid gamer, and you wouldn't BELIEVE the
volume of error messages spit out by WINE when I try to run FS98 or Total
Annihilation under Linux :)

I think it might be helpful at one of the meetings to do a presentation on
Linux integration into networks where the predominant OS is Win95 or NT or
MacOS.  I have some knowledge on the subject and would be happy to be one
of the speakers, but I think we should involve other people who are
actually doing it (I've managed to expunge, pretty much, non-Linux OSes
from Pacific HiTech, so i'm kind of in a unique position here).  The
integration issue isn't going to go away, even if Linux DOES gain
considerably more market share, and it's better to address it than to
vilify Win95.  That's what the nomikais are for, anyway, since you can
flame people and then blame it on the beer :)

--------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com, sstone@example.com>
               <sstone@example.com>
Linux Developer/Systems Administrator for Pacific HiTech, Inc. 
http://www.pht.com		http://armadillo.pht.co.jp
http://www.pht.co.jp	        http://www.turbolinux.com


---------------------------------------------------------------
Next TLUG Meeting: 11 April Sat, Tokyo Station Yaesu gate 12:30
Featuring Tague Griffith of Netscape i18n talking on source code
---------------------------------------------------------------
a word from the sponsor:
TWICS - Japan's First Public-Access Internet System
www.twics.com  info@example.com  Tel:03-3351-5977  Fax:03-3353-6096