Ubuntu journey II - Printing and scanning

Printing and scanning in Ubuntu proved to be much easier than expected. Ubuntu easily recognized the HP Photosmart C3500 series that I had, and right away I was able to print documents off the text editor. The Scanning application (XSANE) was a breeze to operate and I was able to scan documents to various formats.

However, my favorite lightweight editor on windows was SciTe, so I installed it in ubuntu also, and tried to print from it. Turns out SciTe uses the "a2ps" program to print, and it was not able to direct the output to the printer. A bit of googling told me that replacing a2ps with "enscript" would be able to do it. So I replaced the print options in SciTeGlobal.properties file, but now I get an error that its not able to find the printer class. Guess I will have to look into this more.

But besides that, the printing and scanning functionality works like a charm in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu journey - Hardy Heron

I just upgraded my ubuntu distro to Hardy Heron (8.0.4) from Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). I did not use it a lot when I had Gutsy but now, hearing about how much better the distros are getting everytime theres an upgrade, I am setting out to explore it more. The major difference I noticed in Hardy was that I am able to make ubuntu work on dual monitors directly without running additional scripts. In Gutsy, I actually had to run an XRANDR command everytime I logged in, so that I could switch it from clone mode to dual monitor mode. Not anymore in Hardy.

Further things I will be exploring on Ubuntu in the coming days:
- Printing and Scanning
- IPOD and music play
- Python, Django
- Java Development with Eclipse
- Ant, CVS, Tomcat
- MySQL

If I find that the above are easily setup and software development in that environment is as easy as windows, theres no reason why I should not completely switch to Ubuntu.

Oh I will have to go back to windows frequently though, since Cricket games for PC do not run on Linux yet!