William H. Magill on Tue, 11 Feb 2003 12:50:16 -0500


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Re: [PLUG] Without OS X



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 # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com

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