Author Archives: Oren

How HP & Microsoft donate to world pollution (and Ink business)

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Or: "how to set draft printing quality as default"

[warning: non Linux post]

I've had two pretty modern (year 2006+) HP InkJet printers. Their driver adds a new tab to the Windows "Printing Preferences" dialog (I really enjoy those vendor-specific dialogs!), through which  one can change the printing quality.

For 90% of my home needs, black-only draft quality is enough, so upon printing, from the "Printing Dialog", I click "Printing Preferences" and change the quality to black-only + fast/economical printing:

However, the GUI designer forgot (or the MS API doesn't allow) a "make this the default" button, which is a MUST in my opinion.

A quick digging revealed the forbidden truth, though.

So, how can we really set the default printing quality?

Control Panel -> Printers -> right click on your printer -> Properties -> "Advanced" Tab (Cuz it's only for really advanced users! are you sure you are one?) -> Printing Defaults button:

Microsoft (and Apple), as the biggest OS vendors, have the [almost] ultimate power: they set the rules for most of the world computers, and they set the defaults. By making power-saving options very straightforward, and even making the defaults environment-friendly, they can decrease the world power saving by very large numbers. Same should go with Ink saving.

Enough VMware, let's use VirtualBox-OSE!

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I've been using VMware server mainly for accessing Windows (sometimes I need MS Office or IE). VMware server is a very good product, but is also closed source, and very disconnected from the community.

Some of the source is open (such as vmmon & vmnet kernel modules), but still VMware don't cooperate with the FOSS community. This means that good people make patches to support newer kernel versions, but they act like pirates. VMware won't apply their patches. VMware can't work out-of-the-box on kernels since ~2.6.21 or so.

Same goes with a more minor, X <-> GTK <-> VMware bug I've been writing about. It might be a non-VMware bug but something in Xorg. But I'd expect them to figure it out and post a message or even help to fix the Xorg bug, if it's an Xorg bug. Instead, they either ignore our requests or tell that we use non supported distros. Which is true. But if the problem is Xorg7.3 integration, they'd better fix it, because RHEL 6 would probably use it as well. Same goes for new kernel versions.

Both bugs are being neglected by VMware for more than a year.

So screw them, I chose a community supported virtualization solution: VirtualBox Open Source Edition. Debian has a kernel module package for each kernel versions, and stuff looks much better so far.
I'd suggest VMware to hire a single FOSS guy for Linux integration and "community special tasks". He'll be very busy, but I think that this is all it takes to change their "community involvement" upside-down.

Update: been using it for few days, VirtualBox is cool 😉