Linux in Brazil

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 07:16:12PM -0400, Tim Writer wrote:
> My experience with JavaPOS, Linux, and a variety of essential peripherals
> from well known companies suggests otherwise.  One such company ships a Java
> SDK with a Windows DLL for accessing the serial ports, no shared library for
> Linux, and no documentation on what components are required under Linux or
> where to get them.  Overall, I'm left with the impression that, outside of
> IBM, there aren't a whole lot of developers using JavaPOS on Linux.

Just because a company doesn't supply easy to use software for Linux,
does not mean that making the hardware work is very hard.  I have made
receipt printers work perfectly using small perl scripts before, simply
by finding the PDF documenting the serial port commands that printer
used.  The kiosk hardware was very much meant to run windows and
certainly the manufacturer did nothing to make linux easier.  I even had
to write a touch screen input driver for X (which turned out to be
fairly easy too amazingly enough).  Making serial devices work really
isn't that hard most of the time.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml