What is your OS -- windows, mac, linux?

[masalai]

Check with the cannon website/help sections and suggest that since Linux has more users than Mac and they support mac, so that it is high time that they provided drivers (at least on their website as does brother printers..... (I use brother c130 & c135? printers and download drivers from their - brother- website) - I used to use cannon but went brother because of the drivers and it is a scanner/copier/printer function I wanted.... The installation process for printers within linux will give results eventually just try similar machine drivers provided by the linux community....

Contact your broadband modem provider and ask what is the local "web-address" so you can do adjustments from your web-browser.... (tell them you run Linux Mint/ubuntu/debian lineage OS)....

Open "Synaptic package manager" and use its search function.... by typing in full name of device....

No defrag.... all else is usually automatically done look in all menue sections most of that will be in "administrator" section or "control centre" - - I am no expert, and I just try it, if it looks like it may do what I want????

[Mychael]

Well here I am sending my first message from a Linux machine. Never found drivers for the modem but on a chance I plugged in a USB wireless connector that I used on another machine and much to my surprise Linux found that. So now I am online.

Much easier as I was able to get into the Linux site and then let Mint install do the work for me.

Still cannot get printer or scanner to work and the O/S does not see the FDD, also has a strange way of handling a 2nd HDD.

Other impressions,,, Certainly can run effectively on much less memory then windows would be asking for.
Most things are fairly intuitive to do although I would have to say they are just different, not better the a properly working Windows O/s.

I miss the start keys in the windows toolbar for quick loading a program, I find it a pain having to go through the Mint menu every time.

It loads faster, shuts down faster. It's versions of the MSN chat programs are workable though not as good. Firefox (which I had on my windows machine anyway) saved some of my bacon, I had fox marks installed and it found all my current bookmarks.

This will make a good backup machine.

Mychael

[masalai]

Good for you Mychael, You can set small icons on the "menu bar" and they will work with one click, or you can place the icons on your desktop by dragging from the menu and it is done! from there it is a double click. FDD is a conundrum - got to be set up in BIOS first, I think???? - it recognised on my notebook many years ago but I do not know about now? do a search in the "package manager".... - I just bought a usb FDD to transfer wife's data across - so I will be doing this next month....

[Luckless]

This poll is highly biased, as a Comp.Sci. Student I tend to have both my windows and linux boxes running at the same time, using both about equally. While I might get a little more actual use TIME on windows for games and web browsing, most of the actual work tends to happen under linux.

[masalai]

Luckless, you do not even need windows/vista as games for that will play using "wine" as does freeship and various clones of that package. Also Linux has the original (similar visually) tetris and a lot of other stuff now lacking in windows...

[Mychael]

Some time down the track now I am still alternating between Windows and Linux.. I put a new HDD drive in the Linux box, partitioned it (that was a bit of trial and error) and now run four different Linux Distros as takes my fancy to play with. Although Mint 6 Main edition seems to be the one I use the most.
Tracked down a Linux users groups (aint many around) and soon found out that very few (read none) PC repairers handle Linux.. As a Linux user your out on your own.
The Windows machine has become horribly flakey, really giving me the irrits, it keeps finding a new way to crash. If you were a conspiracy theorist you'd say Microsoft was doing something in their updates.. I have not installed anything new in the last 3 yrs (except Microsoft updates) and my hardware is no more then 4 yrs old.. So why should my XP system which was once very stable now be getting very unstable... Weird.

Mychael

[Luckless]

Originally Posted by masalai

Luckless, you do not even need windows/vista as games for that will play using "wine" as does freeship and various clones of that package. Also Linux has the original (similar visually) tetris and a lot of other stuff now lacking in windows...

True, but doing DirectX development work is less than fun under Wine. Wine isn't perfect, and several programs I need for different things run horribly under it, or simply fail to run at all.

Linux is good for tools I use in school, but games and other things are just far easier to work with on Windows, and I don't need to worry about things.

[masalai]

Because Bill G needs more money, - trying to induce you to buy vasta vista

[marshmat]

Ahh, but Vista's already dead, sacrificed on the altar of Windows 7 which is scheduled for release this fall (read: next summer).

I never cease to be amazed at how quickly Windows grows. Vista takes up five times the disk space of WinXPP, but I have yet to become aware of any genuinely new functionality. The core architecture is completely different, the GUI is prettier, but it still does essentially the same thing.

I wish I could use Linux for everything (I have Ubuntu on the other half of this machine, and love it). Unfortunately, WINE is nowhere near all it's cracked up to be.

[BillyDoc]

I have come to positively despise windows, yet I have to use it myself for some expensive legacy programs I own. I absolutely refuse to buy new ones and compound the problem, though. If the program won't run on Linux, I won't be using it.

Just this last week my wife asked me to remove Vista from her new HP laptop (HP HDX16t) and re-install windows XP. Vista was giving her nothing but grief. She had begged HP to sell her a laptop with XP loaded, but they wouldn't. Like a fool, I told her that if it was really awful (it is) we would blow it away and load XP for her. She has to use windows for her work.

No problem, I told her.

So, we backed up all the important stuff, made the "recovery disks" and I nuked the hard drive with DBAN. Then the fun began.

XP wouldn't load. It gave me an error message saying I had a virus or something on the hard drive and that I should run CHKDSK /F. Naturally, there was no way to actually do this.

After hours of searching on the web I narrowed the problem down to the SATA drive on the laptop needing a driver. Windows XP let's you hit F6 when it first starts up to be able to add such a driver, so I went to the HP site and downloaded their SATA driver for this laptop and XP.

I tried putting this driver on a CD, and when it came time to install it just popping the XP disk out and the driver CD in . . . but no luck, it had to be on a floppy disk, on a computer with no floppy drive.

So I borrowed a USB floppy drive, and that seemed to work! XP loaded it and . . . gave me the BSOD a few minutes later with the same error message.

More research. Now I find that I have to first disable the SATA driver that is built into the BIOS. So I go back to setup and, guess what, there is no way to disable the SATA driver in the BIOS, or do much of anything except set the time/date and a password. This laptop has been designed to only allow Vista to be loaded.

I ended up having to re-install Vista, which is totally unreliable.

For my own computer I use SuSE Linux and love it. For windows programs I still have an ancient copy of windows 2000 pro and dual-boot into it when needed. Win2K runs pretty well if you isolate it and don't let it near the Internet, because you can skip all that anti-virus overhead. It's old enough so that it doesn't have drivers for modern Ethernet hardware, so it doesn't know it's there and can't call mama and report all my private information either, like it used to.

If anyone knows how to beat HP and Micro$haft on the Vista thing, please let me know!

One thing for sure, though, I will not be buying any more HP products.

BillyDoc

[masalai]

BillyDoc,
I asume that in your case (a purchase failing to do as advertised/claimed, you can return it... I know HP do present laptops with linux installed, maybe a google search will produce some answers for you in USA... Because of your "Copyright laws & patents in USA & Japan" the best Linux versions are not recommended as prosecution may result... I use Linux Mint "gloria" Main edition and do not miss XP (the last OS from Bill G I used, before it got updated to something else....) I can read and write pdf and most MSOffice file-types as well as the native Open Office formats.. Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird mail work fine and all their files are in my main user directory which means backup is easy... I am sure the package manager can find something to replace your "expensive" MS apps or else something similar has been ported to linux for a similar fee to your "expensive proprietary app...

[BillyDoc]

Actually, Mas, HP gave us 30 days and then . . . no return. Unfortunately, we thought we could get it sorted out, but this does not seem to be the case. The time got away before we tried to return it. And, of course, Microsoft isn't about to guarantee their products to actually work.

I do use Linux for almost everything, but I also have some programs that I have to run on Windows. The main one being Hypermill, a program that I had to pay $18,000 for!!! Without it I can't use a CNC milling machine I have. And most of it doesn't work as advertised, and never did. Again, no returns. Bastards. I'd love to sell them a car under the same conditions. They wanted me to pay them another thousand a year for "service" to get their shitty software to do specific projects. I refused, and continue to limp along with it. I'm not about to give them MORE money. With lots of trial and error I can usually get it to do something useful, barely.

Bugs for Bucks, the American way to do business.

[masalai]

If it does not do as it is supposed to do, A) false advertising, B) misrepresentation of a product (almost like a new car which is UNROADWORTHY), and I am sure you could drum up some more issues and get the local TV show to run with it? Works here in Australia, but then we are a backward little third tier country...

SHIT 18K - at that price they should include the hardware to run it on - No wonder America is falling down????

[BillyDoc]

Oh, that software was falsely advertised all right, but you should read those EULA documents some time. There is NO recourse for the buyer. They could probably be busted in court, but who has the money to do it?

I just don't do business with them any more. I've tried to get someone interested in an open source project, but so far no luck. I even dropped a project a few years ago that would have involved buying a very expensive milling machine (a DME product) because the software to run it cost twice what the mill cost! When I pointed out to the rep that it would be a good idea for the companies selling these machines to sponsor an open source effort I just got a blank stare in return.

I still think there is an opportunity for some hot programmer there, just couple a tool-path program to some established program like Rhino, or start from scratch. I have seen some feeble attempts at this, but nothing usable for real-world complex projects. I would think that the milling machine manufacturers would love to get the software costs down and would pay someone handsomely to do it. It makes their products much easier to buy, after all. In my case it made the difference between a sale and no sale. Go price a 5 axis CNC machine sometime and you'll see the scale I'm talking about.

[marshmat]

I've been through the exact same Vista-to-XP problem you were ranting about there, BillyDoc, although with a Toshiba in my case. Damned BIOS was hardwired to screw up any attempt to change the SATA driver. That's another firm I won't be buying from anytime soon.

There are only a handful of apps that keep me tied to XP. Unfortunately, they're all my main ones- Rhino, Sibelius, a few specialized scientific apps. I'm slowly tracking down Linux versions for a lot of the stuff I use, but installation and configuration can be a bit of a pain sometimes. (Still can't get the 3dconnexion SpaceNavigator to work properly on Linux, for example.)