[ale] tipping point for desktop linux (actually does something easy with scanners)

[Neal Rhodes]

I had a weird new experience on Friday with linux.

Our Brother MFC-440CN printer/scanner/copier had been refusing to talk
to the XP workstation that it's been connected to for about 10 years.
No amount of fiddling was cajoling it into communicating.   We needed so
scan something for our business license. 

In desperation, I thought I'd just see if I could do something with our
Centos server to diagnose if the problem was the Scanner or the
workstation.    I could ping the scanner. 

To my amazement, I just googled "brother linux scanner" and found
Brother's website with Linux drivers, found the driver for the
Redhat/Centos/Fedora/64 bit flavor, found coherent instructions,
installed the driver, then used the Add/Remove software to install
anything that said "scanner", and voila, Xsane came up, found the
scanner, and produced a multipage PDF.    All within about 20 minutes.
And the directions didn't contradict itself, and it ...just worked. 

I don't know about anyone else's experience with Linux desktop
functionality and vendor specific hardware, but I'm somewhat in shock it
was that simple. 

Neal
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