It Just Worked

I finally got around to rearranging my home office within the past couple of days.  Mrs. Salad Is Slaughter was tired of seeing her new photo printer not connected to a computer and to do that I had to move some things around.  I finally got the new printer hooked up to the MS Vista laptop.  It would have helped if the documentation showed the location of the USB port to connect the printer directly to the computer instead of the USB port to connect the printer to the network, put I guess you can’t have everything.

I was left with an old printer and an old scanner laying around so I decided to see if I could get it to work with my Linux Ubuntu laptop.  I connected the printer to the computer and Ubuntu recognized it immediately.  I didn’t need to load any special drivers, I didn’t have to spin around three times and do a back flip, I didn’t need to reboot the computer, it just worked.  I printed a test page within minutes of connecting the printer.  Compared to what I had just gone through with hooking up any other printer I’ve connected to a Windows box in the past…  Well, there’s no comparison.

I still have issues with the old printer; it’s not printing clearly but it wasn’t when it was connected to the Windows computer either.  Not even after I installed new ink cartridges.  I think I just need to clean it.

I took a look at the scanner sitting on the table.  This scanner is old.  Mrs. Salad Is Slaughter got it years and years ago from somewhere.  It had worked fine with Windows XP but at the time I also had the driver installation software.  Where that disk is now, I know not.

When I got the MS Vista laptop I attempted to connect the scanner to it.  I didn’t have the CD containing the driver but even if I did, I doubted that it would have been compatible with Vista.  Microsoft is funny that way.  I hooked up the scanner anyway with the hope that the driver was preinstalled, or that Vista was smart enough to find it.  Hey, that’s what they advertise, and it did work for other things like a mouse and a keyboard.

No joy.  I searched for drivers on the web.  No luck.  That scanner just sat in the room, unused and neglected for a year, or year and a half.

I looked at the scanner again.  Would it work with Linux?  I plugged it in to a USB port but didn’t see a friendly message indicating that the new hardware was detected like I had with the printer.  I did a quick google search for scanners and Ubuntu.

Turns out there’s a program called xsane available on the software installation menu so I told the computer to go for it.  The scanner worked for the first time in ages.  I was pleased.  No rebooting, no sacrifices to the gods, no issues.  It just worked.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to get my wireless connection to work, and how to change the default value of the MTU for the wired network and I’ll be set.

To quote Greg Laden, “Unix is not for everyone.”  But if you’re willing to learn a few things you can be successful on a platform that’s faster, more stable, and more secure than a Windows box.