new printer

I love Richard Stallman's often recounted printer story, and as a long time user of a Free software desktop (exclusively for nearly 15 years now) I empathize with the pain of getting printers working well with Linux based systems. Well, CUPS has become so good these days and printer manufacturers seem to care enough about Linux support that things are actually pretty good, if not perfect, these days.

Still, when we decided to get a new printer for the house I approached the task with a certain amount of personal surrender and the expectation of annoyance. I spent some time one afternoon looking at the various options for a simple black-and-white laser printer, preferably with duplex printing support (aka "print on both sides of a page") and settled on an entry-level Samsung printer, the ML-2955DW. It seemed a good product on paper in terms of the price/performance ratio. Even though it's ~1 cent more per page over the life the printer (something that doesn't matter too much to us as we don't print that much), it got very good reviews online and has features like Wifi and the sought-after duplex.

Going back to the Linux support, I was a little nervous when I searched for reports on using this printer with Free software operating systems: I only found a couple of hits, the primary one being one fellow's somewhat manual and only semi-successful effort to get it working under Fedora. So with the knowledge that it does work (if with some effort) and figuring "Hey, I'm a geek with Linux know-how so I should be able to get it to work, right? Samsung makes all kinds of Linux devices these days so they must have reasonable Linux support, right?", we placed an order.

When it arrived we set it up in the home-office and were very satisfied with the weight (it's light) and look (it's elegant from the blue-LED light buttons on the control panel to the fold-up lid on the paper output to the paper size markings on the adjustable paper tray)  and happily surprised with some of the nicer features like the WPS button for wifi setup. I pressed the WPS button on our wifi AP and then on the printer and waited a few seconds until the WPS button stopped blinking on the printer. In theory, it was set up and ready to go. Now to set it up under Linux.

We fired up S.'s laptop running openSUSE 12.1 and went into the printer config. After not finding the exactly right driver, we went to Samsung's website where the "Universal Driver" package was available for download. After unpacking it to disk, expecting to start a bunch of cp and vim as root, I saw that it had a GUI installer. Even more cool: it uses Qt! There is also a text mode installer, but the Qt GUI worked like a champ and was amazingly simple and dreadfully uneventful to use. It set up CUPS perfectly, detected the printer on the network quickly and when it came time to print a test page .. up popped the Qt printer dialog! The only thing that could have been better is if they had included the Linux software on the CD that shipped with the device.

Still, my Linux hardware pessimism kicked in: it was all going a little too smoothly. Would it print properly, or would we get some strangely bad output? Would the features like duplex printing work without any tweaking? We too it for a test drive and ...

... everything. just. worked. Yes, including duplex printing. LibreOffice seems to have some problems with that feature (though perhaps I did something wrong there: it's print support is so baroque and difficult to use that I would not be surprised if that was a PEBCAK error ;), but all the Qt and KDE software I tried worked flawlessly.

The moral of the story, at least for me, was that the Free software desktop has come leaps and bounds in the last decade. My dinosaur-era expectations of trouble were not rewarded, and instead I was treated to a great experience. Thank you to everyone who has worked on making this possible: those who have slaved over printing support, those who have made awesome toolkits like Qt to tap into all the features, those who have guided companies like Samsung from the relative dark ages into the light when it comes to Linux support ... to all of you: my deepest gratitude.

Amazing how one little printer can tell such a big story to the right person. :)

add-ons app preview

I did up a small screen cast today of where we are at with the Add Ons App for Vivaldi. We have a shockingly short list of things left to do for version one which will be on the device image, which is always good when you're at the end of the devel cycle. ;)

In the screen cast, I don't cover the content creator side of it, which is how application developers, artists, etc. can make their creations available to others, but I will do so in a future episode.

I am very happy with how it has shaped up so far, to the point that it is how I get eBooks onto my laptop now. :) It is a really enjoyable application to use that looks nice and works smoothly. Or at least I think so ... watch the video below and let us know what you think! (Please keep in mind that the screen capture software misses some of the animations or makes them appear slower than they are in actuality.)

Click here to download the video in ogg format

As I mentioned near the end of the video, we have a lot more planned for the application such as the Collections concept. It is Free software and you are all invited to join in and help us break improve things.

Vivaldi nearly here :)

After another long "getting the details sorted" session on the phone with our manufacturing partner this morning, it looks like I'll be able to sign the purchase order sometime next week so that the first shipments of Vivaldi tablets can be put together. Which in turn means orders will be turned on shortly thereafter.

I have some even more exciting news: they will come with 1GB of RAM rather than the previously planned 512MB. This makes a big difference in the performance when running multiple applications.

We're now working on getting the OS image wrapped up, and that is coming along nicely as well. Zack has a vritual machine based image creation environment set up, which Martin has been more than excellent in helping him set up. We have branches in the relevant git repositories so that we can further stabilize the code while development continues on in master. Things are coming together.

The other weekend we even had time to put together a little fun puzzle that starts when you open the box and which invites you to explore the device to find where it leads you. It was something the graphic design team came up with and I think it's a really neat idea. It blends so nicely with the Make·Play·Live philosophy. Plus it's just plain fun, at least for those of us who enjoy puzzles. :)

LinuxFest Northwest

It has been a number of years since I've been able to attend LinuxFest Northwest, the grandaddy of the LinuxFests. It seems the further I am from it, the more likely I will be to attend. The first I attended I was living in Calgary, but despite later moving to Vancouver which is just a hop-skip-jump over the border I always seemed to have schedule conflicts. Well, now I'm living in Europe and I will be there this weekend .. well .. sort of .. for certain definitions of "there".

On Saturday, Carl Symons and John Blandford will be hosting a two hour session about Plasma Active, Mer and Vivaldi. I will be attending remotely via video conferencing to speak about what we're trying to accomplish with all of this and where we are headed. There will be a hands-on demo at the event and we will be joined by other Plasma Active people as well as people from Mer.

After an hour or so of presentations, we'll finish with an open discussion where people can ask questions, provide feedback, etc.

There will also be a Vivaldi coupon raffled off as a give-away at the event, so one lucky person will get a free tablet!

I'm looking forward to Saturday and to seeing who attends. If it is like the last LFNW I was at, it will be a great crowd and a lot of fun. See you there! :)

vivaldi ordering delay

We had expected to be able to pull the lever on orders for Vivaldi by a couple of days ago. Last month there were some developments that have consequently pushed back the project by about a month. I'll be sending out emails tomorrow to individuals catching them up with this, but thought I'd let people know via my blog as well.

We are still on track to deliver, however a number of things in our supply chain through to retail have ended up taking longer than expected. When I look back at the delays I can see a good reason and ways we will have benefited in the near term from each of them, but that does not make them any more fun to endure.

In more happy news, development of the Plasma Active Mer OS that will appear on the device is progressing nicely with things like hardware buttons, file management and more starting to really slot in. Thanks to the extended timeline to delivery, we will also likely be shipping from day one with the ability to set activities as private and have them locked with encryption behind a password.