Apple's Mac OS X provides driverless installs for both printers and image input devices. Of course the printers must have drivers from somewhere. OS X bundles that Gutenprint drivers, that are obtained from the Open Source community. I'm pretty sure that Apple either requires or maybe somehow convinces the printer vendors to maintain their Gutenprint drivers. From time to time I manually update all my third-party software on OS X; when I went to get the latest Epson driver, it said to run Software Update from the Apple Menu in OS X. So it can be done. Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman haven't always been the best of friends, but in general Apple has contributed a great deal to the Open Source community. I don't know because I never checked, but I imaging that Apple contributes patches to the Gutenprint maintainers. I don't have a clue how the image input is done. That's for scanners and digital cameras. That part doesn't come from Linux and is quite likely under Non-Disclosure Agreement, as many color image input device vendors have all manner of trade secrets around color management. It's not so good for Open Source, but for the end-user like my Mom, I bought her a nice digital camera for Christmas and It Just Worked with iPhoto on her iMac. There was no software to install. Having to hunt down and install drivers for arcane hardware is a Windows thing. There are lots of driver search databases, as well as binary driver installer websites for Windows. I've used them when hunting for drivers for obscure hardware and they are a real PITA. Linux need not be that way. -- Don Quixote de la Mancha Dulcinea Technologies Corporation Software of Elegance and Beauty http://www.dulcineatech.com quixote@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
