[Wylug-discuss] best sig ever

[John Hodrien]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Dave Fisher wrote:

> As I said, my own experience has been mixed. Printing at work has always
> caused the same grief (under lpr, lpr-ng and cups) i.e. jobs just
> magically disappear from the queue or stick there block everything
> else.

See I've found that things with cups are just nice.  Jobs come out of the
printer as expected, *almost* all the time.  Perhaps one of the areas that
needs fixing is in the postscript creation, as the filesizes of the resulting
PS files is sometimes much bigger under linux than windows (which means some
print outs don't appear, as the printer runs out of memory and ditches the
job).

> Printing with cups at home on a more uptodate version of Debian and a
> newer printer is OKish ... but it was a bugger to setup in the first place
> and it still doesn't seem to consistently obey the printing area
> definitions in the foomatic ppd {sigh}.

Now that's one I have found.

> If so, it is still an OSS _printing_ problem, since gs is an essential
> part of the printing chain.

Agreed.  I think some credit needs to be given for the improvement in the
general driver bulk, if not the quality.  Almost always I find that a linux
box can print to a printer with no additional drivers, and windows can't.
BUT, once I've installed the windows drivers, I'm normally better off.
Lexmark provide PPDs to access all the advanced features mind.


> ... hmmm ... I've just completed two installs, one Xandros the other
> Debian Sarge.  Both failed miserably with PS/2 and USB mice, the latter
> also barfed on a USB keyboard.

Odd.  Never had a problem detecting mice and keyboards, even with obscure SGI
Visual Workstation hardware.

> But I was actually thinking of software configs, especially X
> authentication.  With the exception of the very insecure xhost + , just
> about any combination of permissions blocks display from some host/app
> or other.

Only shockingly crap software, no?  What does ssh tunnelled X die with?
Stupid apps that try to display on :0.0?

> BTW, have you ever tried to remap modifier keys in X?
>
> For most people the Caps Lock is a complete waste of space.  For a
> one-handed, right-handed person like me this is doubly cruel, since the
> much-needed ESC key is usually in the far top-left.
>
> After lots of grief and reading I finally managed to hand-code an
> xmodmaprc file (xkeycaps barfs on multiple modifier alternatives) to map
> ESC to the RightShift key and Super to the CapsLock.
>
> Some time in the last year, the gnome folks decided that they knew
> better than me.  Starting recent versions of gnome with X with my
> original .xmodmaprc file in place disables the function keys (?), sends
> the pointer mad (??!!) and ignores the desired remapping entirely.
>
> Since I couldn't find any way of achieving the remapping through gnome's
> own controls, I've gone back to a bog standard keyboard layout, no
> Super/Windows key, and lots of RSI ... gnrrr!

But then again, is it that easy under windows?

> Oh yes, I had almost exactly the same experiece with BIND and DHCP
> recently.  I think this now puts BIND in first place for my unnofficial
> "Worst Manpage on Linux" award.  The tar manpage is a model of
> transparency by comparison.

I think the bash_builtins deserve a beating.  What's the point of a man page
that simply says "you want a different man page".

jh

--
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
                                                      -- Samuel Beckett