"Feisty Fawn" & Windows Vista

Our experience with the LINUX distribution Ubuntu 7.06, known as "Feisty Fawn" came about because of the need to pick up returned mail that results from email newsletters that we send on behalf of non-profits for which we volunteer. You must purge your mailing list of bad addresses as a matter both of good netiquette and to avoid looking like a spammer.

The incoming mail volume can be huge, can be 99% spam, and much of it loaded with malware. The security suite would lock up the machine trying to deal with all the viruses, trojans, etc.. Changing security suites was only mildly effective. The pain grew to be too much to bear, so we had to come up with a better way.

After a brief attempt with a dedicated Windows box, we decided to try LINUX, starting first with SUSE 9.3, and finally settled on Ubuntu 7.06, "The Feisty Fawn".

"Feisty Fawn" was a very pleasant surprise, as it came with Evolution, an email client very similar to Outlook. WINE, a Windows emulator, made it possible to port over the mail list program. One very pleasant surprise was that it only took about 5 minutes to find a third party LINUX driver and install a networked Konica Minolta color laser.

Vista is another story.

I got a new laptop with Vista Home Premium edition. Networking it was easy, but it took me three weeks to find out there were serious bugs in User Access Control that prevented network and networked printers to be installed. Tens of hours wasted!!!!

Funny, the Operating System that is reportedly so user unfriendly took just 5 minutes to install a printer when the "friendly" system took weeks, and then locked it out.

For you techies with like problems, turn on User Access Control, reboot, install the printer as if installing in Windows NT 4, i.e., local port, TCP/IP or other, and then the IP address or sharename, then manually select the driver, print a test page as a check, then turn off User Access Control. Reboot, and all should be fine. HP printers may require.replacing or upgrading universal drivers.