Canon is the most lazy company i know. My printer is only a year or two old (BJC-5100) and this printer can only be used on the Windows operating systems, ie win9x, winme, win2k BUT NOT winXP. this really frustrates me. luckily though i have a network with a win2k box running this printer otherwise i wont be able to print anything.

further more, nearly all Canon products cant run on the Linux operating systems- which doesnt give ppl a lot of variety (esp if Micro$oft already owns over 90% of the home user market)- this forces ppl to stay with Windows if they own ANYTHING from Canon. YET my BJC-5100 cant run on winxp.

i'm fed up with canon.

It sucks that it can't run locally on WinXP, but the part about Linux stems from other issues. The driver model that is being used is "similar" to that of a Winmodem. The OS takes up a fair amount of the grunt work, and then passes along very little for the printer to think about. This carries over to HP Deskjets (many of which are made by Canon), Lexmark, Epson, etc. so it isn't limited to just one maker. There are some brilliant programmers that have written drivers to let Linux emulate the behavior of Windows when it comes to spooling the print job out to the printer. If you are still interested in using the printer in your fav Linux distro, hit the newsgroups and message boards. Also, a lot of the newbie sites are great for that kind of info since it is usually newbies that are looking for info on stuff like that (which was where I learned about the "support" (*cough* *cough*) for my HP DJ722c a few years ago.