Denis Lemire's Site

Having a new addition to the family (our new month old daughter, Allison) my wife was itching to begin printing some photos to get started on a “Baby’s first year” type of scrapbook. Unfortunately our HP Officejet printer decided that it was above the task of putting ink on paper some time ago. No amount of pleading with this lousy HP printer would convince it otherwise. Given the circumstances, after some discussion, Jessie and I decided that we had little choice but to fire the Officejet and seek a replacement.

A quick Google search for the MFC-495cw prior to running out to Best Buy confirmed that people appeared to be having success with this printer under Ubuntu. Given that, the decent feature set and the low price of $99 we decided to give this printer try.

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About a month ago, I reached the breaking point of my own curiosity and decided to wipe out my Ubuntu installation in favor of the latest Fedora release. The VAIO notebook I loaded it on has typically served as my ‘plaything’ machine, as opposed to being my primary workhorse computer.

Due to this choice of purpose it changes Linux distributions or even operating systems on a pretty regular basis. More recently I was even perverted enough to allow it to dual boot with Windows 7 Home Premium, but that’s a filthy confession for another day.

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Not being a man of patience, I figured with the final release of Gnome 2.22 included in the latest Hardy Beta, now would be a good time to jump on the Hardy band-wagon.

Everything seems to be working solid. They’ve even included the previously missing Keyspan module. Woo hoo!

Unfortunately I did run into one major issue, Compiz completely stopped working after the upgrade.

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Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was released yesterday. Overall the improvements are huge. Amongst other things driver support for my aging four year old laptop is nearing perfection.

The only thing that did not work out of the box is my trusty Keyspan USA-19HS USB to DB9 serial adapter. Primarily my laptop is used as a portable tool for on-site network administration. This work often involves configuring various enterprise grade hardware via a serial console. Needless to say, this is functionality I depend on.

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