Re: [PLUG] Without OS X

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at 11:55  AM, Fred K Ollinger wrote:
> > Yeah, but...
> > There is also the issue that most printer manufactures want to sell 
> > you
> > new printers -- consequently they don't provide CUPS drivers for many
> > printers that still work quite serviceably in OS 9.
>
> I don't want to belabor this point b/c the job is long over, but the
> according to the company's website (epson), the driver did work in Mac 
> OS
> X, but not w/ the jaguar upgrade. This is probably really rare, but it
> happened. According to Apple's website, downgrading jaguar was not an
> option. We upgraded b/c the customer had some other problems w/ 
> something
> that I attributed to a bug.

Jaguar "broke" all previous printer support. It replaced lpr printing 
with CUPS - and there is essentially noting in common between the two. 
As far as I know nobody  has written a printcap to <whatever CUPS uses> 
converter. And so far, I haven't found a "simple enough for me" 
description of CUPS that tells me -- "Oh yeah, you can just take an OS 
9 PPD file and stick it here and it works again."

The basic problem is that Apple is supporting a "hoped for standard" 
from the Open Source community which is not really supported by anybody 
else. It is a situation which really does hurt just as much as 
supporting a proprietary version.

>  The Mac OS X gui made me feel very powerless.

If you are talking about the printing system, it is because the CUPS 
system has no GUI... and it shows. [Actually, it turns out it has a web 
interface that isn't very well/widely known about.] The problem with 
CUPS is that even though it is a GOOD idea, it is a NEW idea, and not 
(yet) a mainstream idea. Consequently there are very few people who 
understand it fully, and even fewer who understand it enough to make 
correct and intelligent comments on how to resolve problems with it. 
This particular issue is a classic problem for the "early adopter" or 
"innovator."  It doesn't mitigate the problem, but it has to be 
acknowledged -- when you do something that others are not doing, you 
are going to have problems.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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