Digital BW, The Print

Roger L Sopher writes:
 > My increasingly senile brain started kicking in (or at least sputtered a
 > bit)  last night and it struck me that FreeBSD rather than linux might be a
 > better way to go in setting up a printer box using Roy's Quad.  Since he
 > developed Quad for OS X, which I believe is a GUI on top of Unix, and
 > requires a version of BSD to be loaded in order for Quad to run, could one
 > use the FreeBSD version of unix to do much the same thing, perhaps without
 > as much of the conversion that Linux might require?
 > 
 > Do any Unix gurus have an opinion?
 > 
 > Somewhere in my box of discarded stuff is a copy of Free BSD and I think I
 > might give it a whirl.

I'm a FreeBSD bigot, and am planning to work on just this thing when I
get back from my current road trip (mid-august).

I don't think that FreeBSD will be easier "because OS X includes large
parts of FreeBSD", since Apple put all kinds of Mac-ish/Next-ish stuff
into the mix which Roy seems to take advantage of (e.g. printcenter
stuff).

I'm also not sure that it's going to be clear how to get all of the
nice options (e.g. choose this curve or that curve, or ...) to show up
from the print server....

I do think that it's easier to get a clean build of the various weird
peices (e.g. cups, gimp, gimp-print) under freebsd than linux.  And
yes, I believe that even though much of that stuff is being created on
various flavors of linux.  The "flavor" problem and version-itis makes
things difficult, and the FreeBSD ports system makes it straight
forward to pull it all together.

g.