Published at LXer:

Last night, I enjoyed the nice feeling of using simple, already “obsolete” technology—that is, CentOS 5.3 on my laptop. My antiquated scanner Genius ColorPage Vivid4 still works very well, and I only needed to add a small firmware blob, the same way I was doing it in the past with SuSE and with Debian. Scanning with Xsane was faster than scanning in Windows. I don’t know why. Small operations on the resulting images were accomplished faster in gThumb than in GIMP. OpenOffice.org 2.3 worked very well, despite being “obsolete”. And it even generated a surprisingly small PDF from the final 100 MB document. Amazing. And fast. Nothing crashed. At all.

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