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Why does Linux have to make things so damn difficult?

I wanted to modify some invites (bought, not home made) for my kids forthcoming firework party by printing some text and a map on the back.

Straightforward enough: get a map, layout the text etc. Made reasonably short work of this using the GIMP although I still work quicker in Photoshop simply because of more experience with it.

Then came the printing, which turned into an absolute nightmare! I run Fedora Core 2 which uses CUPS for printing which supports my EPSON Stylus Photo 890 well or at least claims to. The printer prints test pages OK, although I occasionally have to remove and re-add the printer queue. escputil (part of the Gimp-Print package) works after I print something – never before. The trouble came when trying to print a non-standard size image onto a non-standard size paper. First of all the GIMP print dialog defaults to sending postscript which the printer didn’t understand. Secondly it would not accept my custom paper size no matter what I did. Thirdly it insisted on adding margins all over the place. Fourthly when I did manage to print something, it would lock open the USB port so I couldn’t print anything else!

The solution? Reboot into Windows XP, quickly re-create the layout in Photoshop CS, add a custom paper size to my printer (which it remembered!) and print. Job done.

Linux took me two hours and didn’t work. XP took me less than half an hour (including printing 40 invites) and did.

XP and the EPSON configuration utility didn’t do it all automatically – I still floundered a bit adding a custom paper size – but it was a damn site more intuitive.

If this were a /. post, amongst the flames would be comments like: “it works for me”, “use a xyz distro”, or “you’re just not used to Linux”. I’ve been using Linux daily for years now, I shouldn’t have to change my distro to get things to work (although I have ordered my Ubuntu CD), and people like Eric S. Raymond have problems with Linux printing so I’m not alone in this – it shouldn’t be this damn hard!

Jono has set up a wiki for use by the infopoint project – go check it out.

This is my first real experience of using a wiki – I’ve seen them on other sites, and understand the concepts behind them, but I’ve never identified them as being useful for myself or some of the solutions I implement. Having now used it for a few days and got my head round the concepts and the mechanics, I now understand how useful they are and why some people swear by them.

Before using the infopoint wiki, I would probably have implemented some form of bespoke CMS that satisfied the needs of the project. The trouble is, those needs need identifying before you can write the CMS. Then you have all the hassle of changing things (or potentially everything) when you realise they don’t quite meet your requirements. As Fred Brooks wrote in “The Mythical Man Month”:

plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

Using a wiki allowed the site to get off to a flying start (I like to think I’ve contributed a fair bit towards that!), and once we find that pieces outgrow the contraints of the wiki (e.g. dynamic pages), they can be implemented based on what we’ve learnt from using the wiki.

This has led me to re-evaluate how I think of wikis, and I can now see several instances where I can implement them both professionally and personally. On which note, here are several interesting projects I’d like to highlight:

• Tomboy – a personal wiki for Linux/Unix, implemented in Mono
• WebNotes – another personal wiki, also implemented in Mono. This is nowhere near as polished as Tomboy – instead it is simply a Mozilla/Gecko wrapper that points to a local DidiWiki server
• Sub Wiki – a wiki that uses Subversion as its storage mechanism. Wikis normally use their own change control/storage so it’s nice to see an existing solution being leveraged. I found this one via the Subversionary website – a useful support site for Subversion
• Trac – “an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects” that integrates with Subversion

Been there, done that, quite literally got the t-shirt…

Saw lots of big companies trying to sell their enterprise systems to the wrong people. Saw a few small companies and .orgs doing some cool things with Linux. Was generally unimpressed by the whole thing though – as with LUDEx 2004…

It was smaller than LUDEx, but what was there was slightly more interesting. Less people selling Yet Another Distro/Firewall/Server™ than last time as well.

Managed to come away with more freebies this time (although I had to sit through presentations by HP and Novell to get two of them). For answering a question during the HP/Oracle talk, they gave me a copy of The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source – admittedly published by them…

HP and Novell were the dominant stands of the show, with IBM and Red Hat noticably absent (Red Hat had a small presence on the HP stand). Veritas had three people in penguin suits who seemed to be attempting to sabotage the HP presentations. Sun was probably the next biggest stand, and were notable for their half dozen out-of-work wannabe actors walking round in red, white, and black combat gear, yellow glasses and TFT screens showing Project Looking Glass suspended above their heads.

Was slightly bewildered to see Psion there until I realised they had a NETBOOK PRO running a version of Emdebian which was quite cool – all the functionality/power (and more) of the Zaurus in a sub-notebook size package. Shame about the price of the things though! They’re not sure yet whether they’ll release it as a product, or a download for existing owners.

Sat through the “Great Linux Debate” of which Jeremy Allison was the shining light for constantly defending Open Source and free choice attitudes, and IBM, HP, Novell, and Sun were the bad guys for pretty much continously plugging their products rather than answering the questions directly. Sun was by far the worst of these with it’s constant plugs for their Java Desktop (which I won’t bother linking to – go Google for it). I’d like to see more community personalities and less businesses on the panel for the next one.

Managed to blag our way in to see Jono’s talk about “The Linux Desktop as an emerging platform” which was quite good – he’s got some good ideas about how the various toolkits/desktops should try and work together to enhance the desktop experience which I’ve commented on before. I felt sorry for Matthias Ettrich who was giving the talk afterwards, because as soon as Jono finished, the six of us who’d blagged our way in, plus a few others quickly departed. Must have thought we didn’t like him.

The general consensus about these types of events are that they are less for learning/seeing things and more for the social aspect. On which note we spent most of the evening the pub, I had my first Persian meal, and spent most of the evening talking/discussing/arguing with Aq.

Oh, and before he comments, I do owe most people a pint because I had to take off for my train home before it got to my round…

Met lots of cool/interesting people: Jono and Aq again; Ade and Lee from WolvesLUG (LUG of the month apparently); David and Katherine of Clockwork Software (and also of Wolves LUG); Jon Masters (who seems to be going for the record of LUG mailing list subscriptions – he joined Cumbria LUG’s list whilst we were in the pub!); Matt from Bytemark who I proceeded to rib about Linode being cheaper for UML based servers; Lance from uklinux.net whom I might use for my ADSL when the time comes; Wookey and Phillipe from Emdebian (keep wanting to say ‘embedian’) who are doing some really cool stuff with embedded Linux, and are nice guys as well; Alasdair Kergon of UK LUGs and RedHat; and Antony and a guy that looked like Silent Bob (on the right) (sorry for not remembering your name, although I think it might have been Elliott) from OpenAdvantage who seem to be doing some good stuff for F/OS advocacy.

Honorable mentions goe to Jon "maddog" Hall whom I saw but didn’t talk to (I felt it was cheeky when he was there for a book signing and I hadn’t bought it ), and Davee who I was going to meet up with, but we never got anything arranged, although according to his “blog entry” it appears we were in the same place at several times…

Sorry, but no photos. Decided to travel (extremely) light this, which in hindsight was a mistake.