Posts tagged hp

I just need to take two seconds and rave about the driver support in Fedora 13.

Fedora installations on servers have always been notoriously painless for me, and for the last 5 years I’ve always had less trouble standing up a new Sun or Dell server on Fedora than on Windows.  No driver disks, no nothing – just fire it up and it goes.

Desktops have been another matter entirely.  If you read my other posts on ATI Radeon Drivers on Fedora, you’ll see I’ve had all sorts of issues getting Fedora (or any Linux distro for that matter) to work well with my 3D ATI cards and other assorted laptop drivers.

My HP Photosmart C4580 - just works on Fedora 13

Enter Fedora 13.  One of the touted features of F13 “Goddard” is “…enhanced driver support.”  Now, I had no idea what to expect, but I guess I just hoped it’d be better than before.  Wow, how wrong I am.  Driver installations are now just totally painless and are even better than a Mac in terms of “just working”.  Specifics:

• 3D Drivers: For the first time I’ve ever encountered on any Linux distro, the machine fired up and just worked with the integrated ATI Radeon 3200HD controller that I have on my laptop.  No install, no drivers, no updates – I just installed the stock, no-options desktop and it fired up the Radeon with no problems, and ran Compiz just by checking the little “enable desktop effects” button in CCSM.  BLAM.  Very pleased – that usually is a majorly painful process.
• Codecs: Totem and VLC are now nearly impossible to thwart in terms of codec support.  I just fire up Totem, and if it starts to try to play something it doesn’t have a codec for, I just click the little “search” button, and it finds the gstreamer plugins it needs to play the media.  DVD/CSS, h.264, WMV, etc all played without me having to hit up YUM.  BLAM!
• Printer Support: This was a royal suprise to me.  I have a wi-fi HP Photosmart C4580 printer/scanner.  I just opened up the printer dialog and clicked on “add” and then under network printers hit “find”.  It then proceeded to automatically find my C4580 on the wi-fi network, and automatically installed drivers for it.  A test-page printed out with color support immediately and with no fuss.  That took about 1/4 of the time it’s taken me to set that printer up on Windows or Mac.  Amazing!

So, hats off to the Fedora team and the work that’s gone into driver support for this release.  I’m truly impressed.