Club Linux Coffs Harbour

I just moved from Vista to Ubuntu (Hardy) and, among other things, have been trying to install a shared Epson printer attached to a WinXP computer.

I found the System > Admin > Printing thing,and although it finds the shared printer, when trying to find the driver, it doesn't list the exact model I have (Epson Stylus CX3900).

I also found this website:  http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/spc/DL1.do, but don't know how to install the downloaded file...

BTW, I don't know how to use the Terminal, so would much prefer instructions for the GUI.

Jesse, whom some of us met on Software Freedom Day, made the trip up from Kempsey for the last meeting and has a nasty problem. The problem was with a proprietary operating system, but as the solutions to problems with proprietary software almost universally involve free software, I think it's appropriate to ask for help here.

The symptoms sound very much like a screwed up partition table. The suspicion is that the cause was some sort of trojan that was delievered as an alleged "patch" to some proprietary software for MS Windows. After installing this software, Windows spontaneously rebooted (nothing unusual in that), but on boot-up the computer could find no bootable partitions. On further examination, there was no evidence of any partitions at all. Here's my list of possible solutions; please add any others that come to mind below.

Even the mainstream media is waking up to the fact that proprietary software is no longer viable. While it's far from true that all contributers to GNU/Linux are "working for no pay", it is amazing to see something like this printed in the Guardian:

"The Vista saga has two interesting lessons for the computer business. It raises, for example, the question of whether this way of producing software products of this complexity has reached its natural limit. Microsoft is an extremely rich, resourceful company - and yet the task of creating and shipping Vista stretched it to breaking point. A lesser company would have buckled under the strain. And yet while Microsoft engineers were trudging through their death march, the open source community shipped a series of major upgrades to the Linux operating system. How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?

"Microsofties retort that Vista is much more complex than Linux. But it's not the whole story. It could be that purely networked enterprises like the Linux project are actually a better way of producing very complex products, much as Toyota's 'lean' production system is the best way of making cars."

A Slashdot reader raises an interesting point (yes, it does happen from time to time). He bought a license to use a particular product. The vendor then admitted that the product was critically defective and released a fix for the defects. In fact the vendor has done this four times since the original release. However, the customer cannot apply these fixes unless he agrees to additional licensing terms that accompany each fix.

In order to use a product that genuinely works as originally advertised, the customer must agree to licensing terms that he did not agree to at the time he purchased the right to use the product. That's quite a scam.

Given the latest Windows security breach, A311 Death, which has affected more than 10,000 Australian users according to Australia's peak computer security body AusCERT, as reported by ABC Website, now is a great time to press the Australian Tax Office for an explanation of why they offer e-tax in a way which not only exclusively promotes Microsoft, but also forces taxpayers who want to submit their tax online to use a product with a well known history of serious security problems.

This is a test node for demonstration purposes.