[buug] Best XP emulator?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Zeke Krahlin (pewterbot9 at gmail.com):

> So it is mostly the issue of manufacturer quality...and low-income
> newbies like myself, are stuck with a limited selection of crummy
> printers. 

You know, a person of limited means should favour either a well-chosen
used middle-of-the road laser printer _or_ a new, low-end, but equally
well chosen, laser printer.  I'd do that _regardless_ of OS. 

I would eschew inkjet printers entirely, with one small exception, noted
below.  Why?  Because the overwhelming majority of them, and possibly
all of them without exception for all I know, are sucker bets.  They do
not save you money.  They merely seem like they would, on account of low
initial acquisition cost.  The subsequent cost of ink cartridges, even
if you use offbrand ones, kills your budget.

Here's an example of a reasonably well-chosen laser:  Brother model HL-2140.
You can find it new for about $80.  It's USB, 23 PPM print engine, 
2400x600 DPI resolution, B&W, 8MB RAM built-in.  Perfectly good on any
OS.

I wouldn't doubt you can save one Andrew Jackson, maybe even two, over
that market price, if you buy a miserable, money-burning inkjet,
instead, but that would be a really dumb thing to do.

The usage exception:  There are occasions when you simply have an
arguable need to print in colour, e.g., to print out colour photographs.
If so, one can argue that you might want to save up for a _second_
printer, an inkjet, that you carefully avoid using on any other
occasion.  But having an inkjet as your primary printer is, alas, a
self-defeating economics error.

> My point being this: most newbies would simply assume that any Windoze
> printer listed as Linux compatible would assume that the resulting
> printouts would be of equal quality.

You will typically get about equal quality _if_ you are willing to
follow the linuxprinting.org advice about the best _current_ PPD file to
use, as opposed to one that merely is on-hand and minimally works.
Sometimes, that means going out and grabbing the latest _good_ PPD from
the scumbag manufacturer's driver set, either for Linux or for OS X.
I've found that, typically, the people making the claim that "print
quality is worse with Linux" have _not_ done that: They've just sat
there and lazily clicked around with the default print filters (driver)
furnished inside their Linux distros.

Of course, if you're talking about _colour_ printing of images on very
low-end inkjets, that is precisely where some manufacturers will be 
making the most effort to keep their "secret sauce" as secret as
possible.  If you have chosen badly, you will probably have a more
difficult time getting good results.



> It is very difficult to find any compatible printer that one
> can witness first-hand, the print results via Linux, before purchase.

If the store won't let you boot Knoppix or Sidux and print a test page,
you're in the wrong store.

Live CDs are your friend.

But anyway, the linuxprinting.org database has pretty good per-model
information about print quality with different PPDs, and, also, you can
find information on-line.

Basically, all you need is the time and care to bother doing your
research _before_ buying.  Since you're talking about what Linux users
do who don't have a great deal of money to waste, I would think it's 
obvious:  Do your homework before buying.

Or, if you haven't done your homework before buying, and ended up with a
lemon, there's a remedy called "selling and buying, used":  You offload
the turkey, get cash for it, spend that cash on something better.


> :)) I actually did get a cheap USB modem that does dialup nicely in
> LInux: the Actiontec. Total eBay cost including shipping: $34. But I
> did my homework first.

Good!  The Actiontecs that use Lucent Venus chipsets, such as the
USB56012 Model UM100, appear to be OK.  You have to watch out,
especially because models come and go.  Me, I'd probably scrounge around
until I could find a used serial-connected US Robotics Courier external.