Sunday, October 30, 2011

Where's it at?

This morning I encountered an annoying, inexplicable computer issue. I wanted to configure our new printer to work with our netbook, which my fiance typically uses for computing tasks.  It runs Linux, and I had no idea if any printer makers beyond HP had any semblance of Linux driver support.   So I went to the Lexmark website (on the netbook) and saw that they had some Linux support. But I found no drivers whatsoever.  The only choices available to me were firmware updates for the printer itself, and the only OS choices were Fedora Core and Open SuSE.

Rather than giving up or getting angry, I instead got distracted by something on my main computer.  And when I decided to go back to figuring out what to do about the printer, I googled up Lexmark Linux print driver support, without realizing that I had switched PCs.  I came across a list which included my printer, so I went back to the drivers page, and tried again.  This time, I got a much larger list of Linux distros to choose from, and when I picked the appropriate one, I got an actual print driver.  I copied it over to the netbook, and the configuration went smoothly.

My question, then, is why did I get different choices on the driver download page based on which PC I was using?  It's possible that the page uses the web browser's user agent information, but that doesn't make sense, since it lets you choose an OS anyway. It's silly that on the Linux box, I got no good options for Linux, but on another OS I got a list of over twelve unique distros.  

Ultimately, I'm just glad I can print from multiple places.  But if I didn't mistakenly use the "wrong" computer to check, I might not have gotten that far.  I can only wonder how many other unsuccessful driver searches of mine were the result of a similar problem.