Why are printers such a hbuttle 3039

IMO, this gamble is a bad idea. For a great many manufacturers, model numbers tell you absolutely nothing. The Foonly 2000 and the Foonly 2001 can be completely different. For that matter, the Foonly 2000 rev. A1 and rev. A2 can be completely different. The hardware manufacturers seem to operate on the buttumption that the user is just a Windows monkey, so it doesn't really matter - you just tell them to stick in the driver disk that came in the box, and that's that. (For a very real example of this, check out the D-Link DWL-G650, in which different hardware revisions mean different chipsets, so looking at the model number alone doesn't help when trying to figure out which driver to use.)

Anyway, as regards printers in particular, part of the problem is the printer manufacturers, and part of it is due to our own Unix culture. It seems like every time a systems programmer gets bored, he decides to write a printing subsystem. And rather than make users learn new commands, he just names his commands the same thing as the old commands. And rather than offend anyone, distro maintainers decide to include all of the possible printing subsystems. And, of course, when a new programmer sees this mess, he decides to fix it by writing the Really Truly Ultimate Final Printing Subsystem, thereby compounding the mess.

Can you tell I'm bitter? I'm pretty much resigned to printing now and forever being the bete noire of the Unix world, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

JDW