I admit it: now and then, I feel a twinge of platform envy. For example, I would have preferred to build a Linux box for my daughter and her family this past summer. But I had to use Windows 98 so they could run their favorite game (NASCAR 3) and its hardware accoutrements: steering wheel, gas, and brake pedals.

More recently, my girlfriend wanted to print some beautiful pictures she had taken with a Sony Digital Mavica camera. She asked if she could take some of the images to a friend's Windows machine to print them on a fancy Epson printer. A few days later, I saw a special at OfficeMax on an Epson Stylus Color 880. It boasted an amazing 2,880 by 720 dpi resolution, and only cost $149. The itch began to burn.

I had seen a blurb on LinuxWorld.com a week or two earlier about drivers for Epson printers, but I wasn't sure if GIMP supported that particular model. When I got home, I ran it down and found myself on the Gimp-Print project page. (See Resources.) Praise Baud, a driver for the Epson 880 was there! The next day, I returned to the store and bought an Epson.

I wish I could tell you that I had the Gimp-Print software installed in a flash and that was that. But it didn't go down that way. First, I downloaded one of the last betas for the 4.0 release of Gimp-Print. The Website also mentioned that, for common print duties, Gimp-Print could share its drivers with CUPS (Common Unix Print System) and ghostscript, the free software postscript alternative. I wanted those capabilities, so I needed the source code for CUPS and ghostscript. Compiling ghostscript requires having the jpeg, png, and zip compression libraries as well. So I hit freshmeat and downloaded the latest version of each needed item.

Then it was make city for a while. It was also touch and go. I needed to make a number of tweaks, and the readmes were full of warnings of other things that might go wrong. In time, they did. Just when I thought I had cleared the last barrier, I got gcc errors complaining about not finding something to compile a cpp file. That error only fit into the "screwy" category, so I decided to step back and take another approach.

First, I downloaded an even fresher copy of Gimp-Print -- release candidate 1 for version 4.0 (version 4.0 has since been released). I got everything else from the same place: CD number 2 of the Red Hat 6.2 distribution.

Building the two programs included with Gimp-Print was then as easy as the traditional ./configure, make, and