gnu 1, windows 0

Sometimes it’s the little things.

I needed to scan a page into the computer to send in an email, and I thought ‘no worries, there’s a scanner at work doing nothing i’ll give that a go’. Oops, we only have Windows XP x86_64 and the drivers wont work. Fortunately I have a couple of linux distros installed on one of the machines which I never use, so I thought i’d give one a go. Didn’t work first time, wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, e.g. I had to run xsane as root, and I had to get some firmware from the windows installer (no problem actually, I just used wine to ‘install’ the 32 bit package). But once I did all that – worked fine. Installed the firmware, fired it up, got a scan. Email sent. Job done.

XP 64 bit? Up shit creek without a paddle.

7 thoughts on “gnu 1, windows 0”

  1. Pingback: gnu 1, windows 0
  2. One of the most obvious advantages of OSS is ISA neutrality. If I want to go ARM or CellBE, fine. All I lose is flash, acroread, and my WINE apps.

  3. Of course on regular XP it would have been Install driver, Scan. So for 99% of the windows users out there, it’s still much easier.

  4. stop complaining about an exotic version of windows. Windows XP does the job right. Linux on the other side, is anybody’s guess on doing day to day jobs. Hell, I’ve seen an article where openoffice 2.4 doesnt preserve the formatting of documents created with oo 2.0. To my knowledge, ms office is very good at compatibility. So, stop complaining about windows. And who the hell uses 64 bit Windows anyway? Or linux? Nobody, really.

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