Fortiter Et Recte
I have written a new article to follow up my previous (admittedly strongly worded) article on Ubuntu, with the two suggestions posted on my blog recently. I have no delusions that it will make any difference what-so-ever, but hopefully it’ll get people thinking about the issue anyway..
-c
So on another machine (my Dad’s to be exact) after an upgrade to Karmic, both sound and printing were broken.
I fixed the printing issue last night, which was truly strange. The original printer was still there (as I would expect) and could be seen in the GNOME print manager. The problem was that it just wouldn’t print at all. Taking a closer look, for some reason the driver had been reset to “Alps MD-1000″ even though it’s a Samsung.
Changing the driver to anything else and saving the changes did not actually change the driver – it went straight back to “Alps MD-1000.” Adding a new printer resulted in the same problem.
The fix was to log into the CUPS server directly (http://localhost:631) and from here I was able to select the right driver – and it stuck. It could now print correctly.
Going back to the GNOME print manager still shows the driver as being the “Alps MD-1000″ which is just wrong.
So I’m not sure why GNOME print manager is broken, but if I configure the printer directly with CUPS it works.
This morning I turned on my openSUSE work machine and was greeted (as I often am) with a message to update the system.
Today’s message was special however, and perhaps one for The Daily WTF.
I wonder whether “Do not warn me again” means
Don’t tell me when there’s a non-existent update again
Still, it seemed pretty important so I did it straight away!
It’s good to know that I’m protected from security threats so real, they cannot be named 
P.S. If you’re wondering what awesome icon set I’m using, it’s Oxy-GNOME.