OT: Printer driver anyone?

Jim Yanik Inscribed thus:

I reckon you got that right ! Linux seems to have few of those difficulties. Currently running a Deskjet 500 and the latest Samsung MXC4200 all in one on Open SuSE 11.1

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Best Regards:
                     Baron.

Lazy Jim Yanik wrote (blockquoting in full 5-deep):

Don't talk like a fool. NT device drivers **will not** work under Win9x. M$ told manufacturers YEARS ago to stop producing Win9x device drivers. M$ also told them to pull the 9x drivers that were available for old gear from their sites.

There's the talking like a fool thing again.

...and if you only buy PostScript printers, you NEVER have problems with **any** OS.

As mentioned in a previous post, there is ZERO overlap between KernelEx and device drivers.

There's the talking like a fool thing again. Win9x == DOS-based kernel

Duh....AND new hardware to run the new bloatware. You've never heard the phrase "Wintel Upgrade Treadmill"?

...and you haven't needed to *buy* anything new for years now. As Baron alluded to in this thread, Linux has the best device support of *any* OS.

This distro will even run on near-nothing Win98-era hardware:

(More than 32,000 apps in compatible repositories.)

You will also have to look really hard to find a Windoze-only app that _will_ run under 9x but which _won't_ run under WINE. Some things even run **faster** under Linux+WINE.

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True. Other types of printers tend to come with more explicit predictions of the pages that can be printed. The Epson ink-jet printers that I've used tend to lose more ink to keeping the nozzles open than ends up on the paper, so pae capacity with them is very much dependent on how many pages a mont you actually print.

Which doesn't mean all that much. You could try weighing them - if you had access to balance that can weigh a couple of hundred grns of cartridge to +/- 1 gram or better.

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That hasn't been my experience with the Epson ink-jets I've bought, but I haven't bought a new ink jet printer for some five years now - my old Epson Stylus Colour 800 is still working, though the cartidges are getting hard to find.

more.

The Epson cartidges last me for something six months.

ng

I don't even try and refill the Epson cartridges - too messy, and too many things to go wrong.

s.

Unsurprisingly. They've got to be designed to be difficult to copy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I totally agree with your observation concerning drivers. The CPU instruction set is the same, the printer is the same, the port is the same, etc. Absolutely worst case is that the firmware then migrating to hardware might remove certain features enjoyed in the "dim" past. But the one case i know of, that took arou 10 years, and only the most "perverse" feature disappeared. Known example: Once upon a time before the PC/XT appeared, the floppy interface took

2 chips, integrated to one chip, then to something on a motherboard instead of being a separate daughterboard FDC controller. By that time, we were into the 486 and bopping along. All that time, databases were "physically" constructed with gaps between sections for writing data (is there enough space for all of the Smiths?) by writing Deleted Sectors (I am not making this up; i wrote programs working and using them) for those gaps. When the pre-alloated space ran out, then one or more Deleted Sectors would be used for data insertion (in sequence) and those sectors would be re-written as standard sectors. The logic of those chips migrated into the ASICS on the newer motherboards and at sometime then or "shortly" thereafter, the whole logic section of the FDC support that supported Deleted Sectors was removed, so it is absolutely impossible now to red or write them with present hardware. Oh, yea, speaking of FDCs, at some time in the past, that section of the ASIC was further trimmed so that only ONE floppy is supported! So here is a known case that hardware changes would have an effect if one had a FDC driver that allowed access to Deleted Sectors and/or the second floppy.

This seems to be the only case where drivers would not be "universal". Have you noticed that DURING the install of Win(whatever) on board whatever that the VIDEO was always high quality even tho the video board was NOT supported by that OS and required a special driver? Ditto for the CD/DVD drive being used, ditto for special hard drives. I suspect that the same would go for sound, LAN, etc but hat would be hard to prove. So M$ has extremely good "generic" drivers for almost anything you could hope to use...

It isn't all that tricky you just have to remove all the little sticky tabs and insert the thing cleanly into the chassis without scratching the photosensitive surface or taking too long.

How many thousand pages a month or year? Otherwise the question is unanswerable or will be overkill for the duty. Some of the Samsung models or old secondhand HP Laserjets tend to just run and run.

Prices for consumables vary significantly with territory so you had best find out the prices of them in Ethiopia!

That is what they rely on and why they can rip you off.

Regards, Martin Brown

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Not always functional though -- I thought I'd try get a second monitor going by adding a PCI video card, card recognised, generic VGA driver installed for it -- but nothing sent to that screen :( Most recent driver for the video card was WinXP, so I gave up...

MSFT still have lots of disconnects between their drivers and the hardware,

Like their current crappy handling of builtin memory card readers, if you eject drive letter of the card reader, you need to reboot system to get it back -- stupid!

I've msft and Linux for years, both have their good points, perhaps it's time I tried WINE again -- for some old hardware Win7 will never recognise, and, you cannot ask the XP mode to do the job either -- I tried that, after all, it runs on virtualised hardware.

Grant.