Well, not only proprietary drivers are crappy, they are just more crappy than anything else. Free software sometimes suffers from serious problems too. I use a dedicated virtual machine to manage my printing services. One of the reasons I’ve put it on a separate machine is stability: While software on my other machines is updated, […]

Linux has always been a nice free and stable operating system. But from the user’s point of view it was somewhat primitive and lacking some basic features. Perhaps that was one of the primary reasons why GNU continued to develop another operating system, the Hurd. But things have recently improved a lot. By integrating FUSE […]

After spending total amount of several dozens hours of fighting with the infamous udev arbitrary device name assignment, I’ve finally won. Device name assignment is absolutely underdocumented and I was able to get it work only thanks to the kind people sharing their experience and knowledge on the net. For the record, after a lot […]

IIRC, I’ve been running Debian GNU/Linux on my primary workstation since summer 1995. All that time (almost 11 years!) the operating system ran without any single reinstallation, starting with the Debian 0.93R5 version and ending with mixed sarge-etch (post-3.1). I only performed upgrades, I’ve never reinstalled the system from scratch. None of the upgrades required […]

There were old good times when one could install magicfilter on his GNU/Linux system and send a file to a printer and the printer printed the file as expected. Since I started to use CUPS a few years ago it’s no longer true. Whenever I send some PostScript or PDF file to my printer, I’m […]

Ubuntu fixes the most important problem of Debian: its slow release process. Now, about half a year after the latest Debian release, I already move slowly from stable to testing and unstable. Not without reason, most often because new software versions fix bugs of their older versions in stable. More frequent operating system distribution releases […]