Bend in the Weather

Ahh the good ol' days.

I distinctly remember the days when you would stick a printer on the network and then wrestle with the sucker getting the right settings so your printouts didn't look like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Installing custom filters and weird control files were all the norm. Not so much now.

Thanks to Michael Fox advice, I purchased a Brother Mono Laser printer this week (that handles Duplex/Networking as well). The Brother HL-5250DN works 100% under Linux and just required installing the PPDs off LinuxPrinting.org (though it was working fine prior to that just via CUPS and the included driver). What's even more surprising is that they have a Linux section on the Brother website.

I had the printer uninstalled from the box, read the 'setup instructions' included (plug this, remove that, etc), and had it printing duplex in < 10 minutes!

Before Michael's advice -- I had avoided Brother printers -- mainly due to having a PoS Brother plain-paper Fax machine. It seems their printers are much better than their Faxes.

So a big thanks to Michael.

So I ask Linux developers... stop making it so easy to install hardware. Otherwise everyone will be running Linux before too long!

Now -- I only need a bookcase in my office, and I've completed my new office setup!

One thing Linux often gets bashed about is 'the fonts look crap', or something similar.

True, it's hard to deny, most distros ship their distro without enabling certain features to give you great looking fonts. (Basically to avoid patent issues).

Having said that, there is no issue with users deciding what's best for them.

I recently read a blog post describing how to get those nice crisp clean fonts that we all would like. That in turn lead to this excellent post, that has a great ~/.fonts.conf file if you like the look of those silky smooth Apple OSX fonts. (In fact some people think these settings make Linux fonts appear even better than OSX! -- ymmv)

Take a look at his example screenshots, comparing Windows (no AntiAliasing), MacOSX, and Linux -- and you decide.

I turned it on Thursday night, and it's been refreshingly crisp and clean. Well worth a look.

I'd be interested to know what other options people are setting and what they've discovered to get the 'wow' factor out of their fonts.

Some great background reading can be found on the font-config website, and in particular the fonts-conf User Manual.