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Periodically, I get the urge to play around with linux again. I normally use the VMware player and run linux in a virtual machine. I have finally figured out how to install VMware tools. This allows me to print and run several monitors.

I was testing Mint, but ran into a problem that no one seemed to know how to fix. It's keyring wouldn't shut down so you had to force a shutdown to get out. I've also been trying out Solus the last year or so. It's a distro written from scratch (using the standard kernel) and shows real promise. But its a bit rough around the edges yet.

So I finally loaded Ubuntu again this week. It runs nicely, right out of the box, except for printing. And I picked up a new distro called Peppermint, which is a Kubuntu derivative. It's intended for migrating Windows 10 users. I like it so far, though it had a few oddities during installation.

I sysbench cpu prime test on both Ubuntu and Peppermint. Ubuntu took twice as long (10 seconds) to run as Peppermint. That seems odd. I'll have to do more experimenting sometime.

Well, that's a new one. No printer drivers, but I discovered how to set up Google Cloud Print. Now I can print from Linux with no drivers! Goodbye Samba...

lesterb wrote:Well, that's a new one. No printer drivers, but I discovered how to set up Google Cloud Print. Now I can print from Linux with no drivers! Goodbye Samba...

Cool! Printer drivers have always made Linux more complex than I'd like ...

Do you want to hear a joke?




CUPS

Josh wrote:Do you want to hear a joke?

CUPS

I thought that was a horror movie ...

Google cloud print uses CUPS. I had to install cupscloudprint, entered my google email, approved it from my phone, copied the google code into cupscloudprint, then chose the printer I wanted to use.

Not sure what's funny about that. I've almost never been able to get Linux printing working properly. I've always had an unsupported printer for some reason. One of the big reasons for me to avoid linux.

CUPS works well once it's set up properly - but setting it up can be complicated. Sounds like Google handles that for you.

Bootstrap wrote:CUPS works well once it's set up properly - but setting it up can be complicated. Sounds like Google handles that for you.

There's a utility you can download that does the setup for you. I tried CUPS but it couldn't find the printer drivers it needed. But this works well. And the VMware thin print didn't do any better.

So Linux probably wouldn't be a good choice for a non-geek like me? I rely heavily on printing.

It's just that Windows 10 seems too invasive to me.

Joy wrote:So Linux probably wouldn't be a good choice for a non-geek like me? I rely heavily on printing.

It's just that Windows 10 seems too invasive to me.

If you have modern stuff it usually works out of the box, so don't worry about it, provided you use a pretty mainstream distribution (like Ubuntu Linux).