[Discuss] Distribution that tests printing

[lconrad at laymusic.org (Laura Conrad)]

Can someone recommend a distribution for people who use printing
intensively?  

In general I like Ubuntu, but they have a fairly long history of
screwing up printing, and 10.10 seems particularly bad for my purposes.

One of the things I do with my desktop computer is print out music that
I've transcribed for my group to play, and in general I'm printing at 7
for a 7:30 rehearsal, and it's a nuisance when the computer doesn't do
what I tell it to.

I need duplexing to work, the normal lpr options (e.g. -#) to work, and
large files to print without complaining.  Rocket science is in fact
very like all of this, but the rocket science was done at least 20 years
ago, so it should still work, if anyone bothered to test it when they
fiddled with it.

------------

I wrote the above last night while the server was down (and the printer
wasn't printing what I'd asked it to).  Since then, I've had other ideas
less drastic than switching distributions. 

I upgraded to 10.10 from 10.04LTS, where printing worked pretty well,
because I wanted to do something that needed a newer version of python
than was on 10.04.  Is it likely that it would have been simpler to just
install the newer python by hand, or even on 10.04 from the 10.10
repository?

Is it likely to cause problems if I "downgrade" back to 10.04?  That is,
are the programs that I've run in later versions likely to have written
all kinds of features from the future into the config files that the
programs from 10.04 won't know what to do with?  I do of course have
backups of the config files from before the "upgrade".

It's possible, although difficult to confirm, that all my problems have
to do with a bad version of ghostscript.  So would it make more sense to
just try installing the 10.04 version of ghostscript and see if that
fixes things?

-- 
Laura   (mailto:lconrad at laymusic.org, twitter: @serpentplayer)
(617) 661-8097	233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139   
http://www.laymusic.org/ http://www.serpentpublications.org

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.


Elmore Leonard / AARP magazine, August, 2009