Clean is loosing portability in favour of Windows :(

[Antonio Eduardo Costa Pereira]

> Siegfried Gonzi

> I know from teachers that installing Linux is much easier than installing
> Windows. They (teachers and students) where wondering
> why  installing Linux
> could be so simple. They where thinking on a very bad wisdom
>  that Windows is a
> user-friendly operating system and Linux is not. The opposite is real.

I think that you are not exactly right. I must agree that Linux is difficult
to install because the hardware industry tries to push Windows. Consider
the following situation (I have seen it happen): Ms Joyce decided to
acquire a computer to do word processing, and photograph storing.
This woman is a historian, author of a well know book about anarchists.
She does not have a lot of money, but she wants the best value for her
money.  She has chosen Linux as her operational system, both to save money,
and to follow recomendations of a friend.
Therefore, she has bought an Okidata LED printer, almost as good as
a LASER printer, but less expensive. She also bought cameras, scanners, etc.
How to install all this? She was not able even to install the printer, let
alone
the cameras and scanners. Of course, the Linux community helped
a lot. They told her how to write a filter for the printer (something like
this: install the printer in Windows,  decifer its protocol, looking at
what Windows produces,  and write a filter in C; very simple, isn't it?).
As for the cameras and scanner, they could not help much.

Ms Joyce gave up her LED Okidata. She bought an HP Deskjet 720C.
An old printer, much worse than the LED Okidata. Linux would have
no difficulty with an old printer, like that, she thought. Her pictures
would not be
as beautiful as in the LED printer, but she would use Linux! She was
wrong. Linux could not recognize the old new printer either. However,
in the Net, someone wrote a filter to this HP Deskjet 720C. Sorry, said
the author, a former HP employee, my filter works  only in black and white.
But he distributes the sources. Take a look at them, he says, fix the bugs,
and
write what is missing, compile and go. I did not follow the story to its
completion, but I am afraid that the historian switched to Windows.
By the way,  I also have a scanner Genius Color Page I and a LED
Okidata printer that I would like to install in my Linux Slackware
system (yes, I do use Linux). Any hints?

Eduardo Costa.