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Printing in Linux: it doesn't go automatic. Ok, one can say you just have to follow the Gentoo Printing Guide wich is very clear and makes installing a printer very, very easy (just a few commands), but I think we could expect more, especially more automated and integrated in gnome.

First off all, when you have a plain linux installation, gnome and all stuff you need, with no printing devices configured: printing works. You can just print a file without configuring a printer. The big problem is that the printed document doesn't look very good. A plain color is made of textures for example, looks like printing with the first color printers or with kind of colored-grayscales. Off course I want better, so I followed the gentoo guide.

What is it all about? First of all you need to have cups and foomatic installed. No problem, cups should be installed as dependency of gnome and you still can install foomatic if you need it. Maybe CUPS/Gnome could advice you to install foomatic when configuring a printer that has some benefits when having foomatic installed. If you have an HP Deskjet printer, you also need to install the HPIJS driver wich acts like a postscript interpreter between the postscript output and the printer device. Also this one could be recommened when configuring a HP device in CUPS/Gnome. That's all for software requirements. The configuration could be automated more. Normally, you have to create a PPD-file for your printer by hand (just give the model and hardware number to foomatic) or download the right one from linuxprinting.org and place it in the cups directory. I think it must be possible to grep the required information when attaching a printer device with USB. When connecting, gnome should detect the right model, generate the appropriate ppd file and install the printer in cups. Maybe a dialog box should appear informing the user that the printer is added to cups and asking if he/she wants to review the configuration or sharing properties. This would be a real integrated desktop experience.

I know, there are very good Free alternatives for the popular Nero Burning Rom, like Gnome Toaster or K3B, but this news is very important: some people want to stay with Nero, and it is also one more important software vendor admiting the power and potential of Linux, after Adobe and some other ones.

More info here.

Again, I can say it was a very busy week, last one. But I enjoyed it very much! Movie week was good, the party was great. Many good-looking girls at the party, more than normal on engineers-parties ;-) You can see some pictures here and here. I helped cleaning up in the morning, saw my bed only between 8h30 and 13h XX(

That evening, after the party, I went to Brussels, for a meeting with the "workgroup international" of the VVS, the Union of Students in Flanders. There were some political points to discuss. Points I earlier thought of "far away from my bed", but now I've a better sight at the possible impact of them. Very, very important. We discussed about GATS, an agreement between the EU and the USA to let the European insurance companies operate at the american market. No problem with that, but as a return, the Americans want the EU to open our "education market" so they could start private high schools in Europe, privately funded, to fight at our public founded schools, delivering a quality of the best ones in Europe and the rest of the world. With that agreement, students should be seen as a consumer, where you get more if you pay more, instead of as an equal civilian, where everybody has the same rights. Very dangerous situation, I think.

Ex-commissioner Frits Bolkestein
wiki-page: English - Dutch
Another thing we discussed is the Bolkestein-directive (Dutch - English) wich is almost equally, but only about the circulation of services (including education!) in the European Union. You can say "why not? It's good that I can go to an Irish school here in Flanders for example", but then you're falling under the Irish law. For example in Poland you don't have that much privacy-protection and social-protection as you have here, you don't have that good environment-protection as you have here and you also don't have that good educational quality as you have here because our final terms (directed by the Flemish Government) would be appropriate anymore. It can have a very big impact here and can reduce our very good social and environmental protection systems. So, please, sign the petition against that directive. A few days ago, I also red an article in the newspaper about a change of the Bolkestein directive: the "county of origin" part should be modified so that if they start here a Polish school/company, they're falling under our laws instead of the Polish ones. Seems a good evolution then.
International student representation/politics, I like it more and more. It gets more interesting every day.

At VTK, I think our firewall is ready. Now I just need to find out how to configure the DNS-server and then we can give it a test. Tomorrow we'll decide how many people our praesidium will count next year. We also have to vote if "computer" will remain with two people or not. Let's see...

My girlfriend is sick, she has the flu. Seems very hard for her. She's got tears in her eyes from her sore throat and has to throw up. Let's hope I don't get it from her.

Influenza Virus photo

Some good news about the Workgroup Free Software! With the very busy first semester and the exams, it has been very quite around it. But now, I think it's time for a revival. Pieter has sent an e-mail about a linux-lesson with a liveCD to let the people meet linux in a safe environment without any risk. Seems a very good plan to demonstrate the power of linux, liveCD's and free software. A lesson about image manipulation with The Gimp is also in the running. Now, a meeting should be planned quite fast to organise those things. Normally, the meeting'll be on wednesday, 17h15 @ VTK. Feel free to join us! Let's hope it's a big succes and that it can open the eyes of lots of people for the power of free software!

Wilber, The GIMP mascotte

While searching for the nice image above, I also found these interesting links: Linux and Scooby-Doo, GIMP's Film Version and The CinePaint Project.

Yeah! Done my exam Design of Multimedia Applications this morning. I think it'll be good enough. I didn't like it, just two questions: he gave the title of the chapter and we give the content, but it'll be OK. That means there's just one more left! Tuesday, I have Advanced Computer Architecture. Nice course. My lovely girlfriend also has just one more left on thursday, and after that we'll spend some nice time together :-D

With that horrible exam wednesday, I wasn't in the mood for studying this one. I started yesterday evening, wich is very late, so I just slept three hours this night. XX( Even then, badminton was very hard and very nice today. Now, I'm just going to check a few things at my gentoo box and some forums, and then I'll take a long sleep ;-)

My gentoo does some strange things today. Much emerge errors, I'll take a look closer to it. I used PHP5 till now, but I want to go back to PHP4, but that one doesn't compile. Tetex (a dependency of it) also doesn't compile.

I finally gave Ubuntu Linux a try. The LiveCD won't run on my computer, so I tried it at the portable AMD64 at home. Starts quite quickly, seems nice designed (gnome 2.8.1), it just looks good. The WLAN doesn't work, but I'll install Ubuntu x86_64 on this machine later and try it with ndiswrapper. Anything else seems really nice.