The simple pleasures of the obsolete technologies
Last night, I enjoyed the nice feeling of using simple, already “obsolete” technology—that is, CentOS 5.3 on my laptop. My antiquated scanner Genius ColorPage Vivid4 still works very well, and I only needed to add a small firmware blob, the same way I was doing it in the past with SuSE and with Debian.
Scanning with Xsane was faster than scanning in Windows. I don’t know why. Small operations on the resulting images were accomplished faster in gThumb than in GIMP. OpenOffice.org 2.3 worked very well, despite being “obsolete”. And it even generated a surprisingly small PDF from the final 100 MB document. Amazing. And fast. Nothing crashed. At all.
And I’ve only used the Web browser to check my Yahoo mail, to read a page on Wikipedia and two blogs, then I used gFTP to SFTP the lazy way.
Was it too much technology?
Jun 16, 2009 at 14:37
I have an ancient Trust (Mustek) scanner…the kind which gets its power from the USB port and boasts compatibility with both 98 and ME! Actually they offer a 2000/XP driver for download as well. It was given to me by someone who considered it useless and obsolete. So how to use it on my Vista Home Premium OEM pre-install Acer? Not possible, no driver, not supported, doesn’t work with XP compatibility. On the other hand I can plug it into the same cheap Acer black box with Debian booted and it works really well with xsane. Same deal with adding the right firmware blob and I had to uncomment one line in /etc/sane.d/«firmware_name»
It’s a quite good flat scanner, especially at the £0 price
The xsane interface will not be everyone’s favourite; not beautiful, not exciting, perhaps a little confusing in parts, no happy clippy style helper, but it does actually work very well and is easily accessible via Gimp as well. I think the only advantage the Windows driver claims/has is its OCR but when I tried it on an XP machine it was dreadful… I can live without it.
Gimp: I was always happy with the multiple window interface on GNU/Linux (it stinks on Windows because the window management is so poor). So Gimp finally gave in and changed it in 2.6. I tried it in Debian Squeeze, tried to like it… yuk… having a huge empty box on the screen gets in the way at every step. Re-installed 2.4 from Lenny and pinned it and everything it depends on.
I like gThumb a lot for viewing and simple edits like crops and rotation. Possibly it’s the best of the old school image viewers. And one of the few viewers on the free desktop which displays animated gifs properly.
Other antiquated devices (in tech terms): my archaic iRiver H140 died and then my H340’s battery was clearly close to death. Bought a new battery. Supposedly its not user serviceable but wtf, found a guide online and replaced the battery. Realised how easy it is to open these things and have a poke around and replace bits….opened the H140, saw a stray piece of metal was shorting out the reset button (OK I might have dropped it a few times before it died) and cleaned it up. Re-assembled…now I have two fully functional Rockbox’d iRivers which with their ancient and unfashionable hardware can handle every audio format imaginable and the H340 with colour screen plays mp4 video as well….not bad. And when the 1.8″ HDDs die I can use a cheap adapter and replace them with high capacity Compact Flash. I might do it anyway as soon as someone makes affordable 64GB CF. So my old iRivers’ lifespan, nominally maybe 5 years, could become very long indeed while offering greater reliability and longer battery life. Or I could toss them in the trash and buy a DRM friendly iPod and install iTunes in wine…… hmmm which way to go on this…
Jun 16, 2009 at 14:47
Yes, the new GIMP 2.6 main window is annoying and yes, it's even worse under Windows!
Jun 17, 2009 at 10:14
You can change the main window behaviour to a more 2.4 style by edit-> preferences-> Window Management and change "Window manager hints" to normal window.
Jun 19, 2009 at 14:42
fred, that's a different issue. In older versions there was no main window if there was no image loaded. Only the toolbox and any dock would show. Now that the toolbox menubar items have moved to the image window one is obliged to have the image window even with no image loaded. It's no longer possible to have the toolbox/dock discreetly rolled up leaving the screen free….one can roll up the image windows and juggle with the mouse and tab keys when loading an image but it's bigger and more intrusive. A simple facility has become clumsy. I guess I'll get used to it but I'd have been happier if the developers had stuck to their guns and not listened to the endless complaints from people using an OS with inadequate window management or those who recoil in shock/horror/stupidity on seeing a multi-window interface.