On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 10:22:29AM -0500, Nate Bargmann wrote: > * On 2015 13 Jun 08:08 -0500, LM wrote: > > Laurent Bercot wrote:
> > It would be great if Devuan became the Linux distribution that offered > > its users alternatives to more commonly used, often bloated software. > > It would certainly make a great base distribution for other > > derivatives if it did. Most Linux distributions I've run across so > > far try to limit ones choices and make you follow their philosophy and > > way of doing things. Personally, the systems that work the best for > > me are the ones that don't try to lock you into doing things a > > specific way and let you do what you want. > > This, exactly this. Thank you, Laura, you have penned in your last > sentence exactly what my philosophy has been ever since Windows 95 was > dumped on the scene and I went to Slackware to maintain the freedom I > had known with MS-DOS. I think I have gotten lax in the intervening > years (something about aging and wanting to divert my energies into > other areas) and accepted these new monoliths/monocultures for the ease > they provided. Over the past year I have had a rude awakening and am > generally striving toward minimalism these days. > > I would dearly love to dump CUPS in favor of something comprehensible > that would feed my HL-5240 compatible PS or PCL. What's convenient about Cups is that it knows what printer driver to use. What used to be convenient before Cups is that I could just write a program that created a postscript file and send it to my printer using a command like lpr, which knew that the printer was attached through the parallel port. I liked it back then. I could write actual postsript programs that computed diagrams. I have no idea what to do now. As far as I know, everything is intercepted and rerouted. I'm not even sure if my laptop is talking to the printer or to my wife's Apple laptop, which also runs CUPS. CUPS used to e usable. But now? I tried to print a jpeg image a while ago. I used a browser. I had a choice between one mode thta I think was one screen pixel per printer pixel -- useless, and 'fit to page', which seemed to think my standard 8.5 x 11 page was twice as big, so I oonly got a quarter of the image. I think that Brother is one of the companies that advertises actual Unix support, and that my printer an HL-3170CDW, at least, accepts a variety of networked protocols, including some that originated in Unix. But I don't know how to access them without CUPS. There must be a way. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
