Recently my Olivetti Olibook S1300 - a gift of Salvo Mizzi, of the Working Capital fame - died. I decided it was great time to face the experience of making my Acer Aspire one printing. While below you’ll find a detailed report about my journey to make possible to print via Linux with a Canon LBP 810, first I wish to share my thoughts about what all this means.

Plug&Play maybe a frustrating experience if something goes wrong for some reason, since most of the times you have little chances to fix an issue if that arise. On the contrary with Linux you’re given the unique opportunity to be in full control of your destiny, and you can litterally build your own future (no pun intended).

As you can easily figure out yourself - or if you don’t have the time just go on and read my painful experience to make it print - freedom really come at a price here. Note that the problem is not that by bad luck my old Canon printer for some weird reason doesn’t come with Linux drivers. To be honest the LBP810 doesn’t even come with Mac drivers.

The Windows network effect is a fact, and the Microsoft industrial processes associated with making Windows the ubiquitous desktop is also a fact. All OEMs play by te market rules, and they make sure their products are compatible with all the Windows flavours. Unless the market will observe Linux desktop crossing the chasm, we won’t see any YoLD. Period.

So said, go on and read if you want to know how to configure your Acer Aspire to make it print on a LBP810.

As usual everything started by googling a bit around. It might come as a little surprise that Ubuntu forums and blogs that are definitely the best available resources for resolving similar issues.

Using Canon LBP-810 (LBP-1120) in Ubuntu is a must read, and it almost says it all. While the author did a great job, in the meantime Ubuntu released a couple of major versions, and some commands simply don’t work. Let me add also that there are better resources if you need to install Canon drivers, and I would recommend to follow them first, especially the “Configuring Canon services” section.

Now go back to the Using Canon blog post, and follow all the instructions religiously. If some commands are not available and you’ve already restarted CUPS try to install them by using the appropriate old repos. If you find problems associating printer and driver follow the link and read it, and if it prints slowly… well, that’s the way it is!

In case you wonder, with Linpus I couldn’t find a way to make it work. To me Linpus is the worst of both words and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, unless you just use your netbook for browsing. While I’m not a fan of Acer Aspire powered by Windows systems, I must admit it would have taken less than 3 hours to make it print!

I’m happy and honoured to say that I have finally found a person who will take care of SOS Open Source business development.

Read more at SOS Open Source.

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Read more at Slashdot.

So said, SourceForge is still dedicated to being the most trusted source for Open Source, and will continue to provide free hosting for your Open Source project, and you’re welcome either if you need the full set of tools or just a way to distribute your program.

If you didn’t check it out yet, take a moment to look at our brand new Enterprise directory (beta).

If you want to know more about our new corporate entity, you can read all about it at slashdotmedia new website.

Either enterprise-grade projects developed at SourceForge or at other forges would benefit from being enlisted in the new directory, now enriched with a resource center containing useful information about partners, add-ons, books and upcoming events.

Over 40 million unique visitors per month come to SourceForge looking for open source software, and enterprise-grade products is a big part of it. The Enterprise directory is just aimed at making IT Decision Makers’ lives easier, by gathering projects’ relevant information in one single page.

Hope you’ll enjoy, stay tuned!

I have just received an email from the Agency for Digital Italy answering my self-candidature to join the working group aimed at defining the technical and economical assessment criteria for open source procurement.

Apparently they received an high number of requests, and my resume wasn’t good enough, says Francesco Grasso, Coordinator of the working group and sci-fi writer.

Bryan Cheung, Liferay’s cofounder and actual CEO, while sharing his experience about how Liferay grew its project into a product provided me with additional information.

During the call we have been surfacing the ratio of the number of Liferay users over the number of Liferay customers. Having precise and accurate numbers, especially for the number of users, maybe tricky, so Bryan told me Liferay customers/users ratio is between 1/250 and 1/400.

While other open source vendors showed different ratios, the general take is that the more users the better. I remember talking to Matt Asay about the importance of investing in PR.

Among other take aways from the call I’d definitely mention the following.

1. At some point you need a product manager able to integrate customers’ needs into product’s features.

2. The importance of moving to a plug-in architecture, enabling third-parties to add features,

3. Long maintenance matters in the enterprise market,

4. Both Product and Customer development are key to your success,

5. Channel partners and marketplaces are a must unless you want to build a lifestyle company.

Take your time to read the full interview.

For more information visit the PROSE blog.

Thank you for your collaboration!

I look forward to further collaborate with OpenOffice, the Apache Software Foundation and all open source projects making everyday easier living open source!

Since the goal of the survey is to ascertain the requirements of a hosted source forge for EC ICT projects, we’d welcome especially FP7 projects’ members to take the time to answer all our questions.

All individual responses will be treated as confidential however we plan to use a summary of results in future presentations to the community. So, please fill out the PROSE online survey and contribute the improvement of FLOSS adoption in European projects.

For more information on the survey visit the prose BLOG http://ict-prose.eu/blog

Thank you for you collaboration!