It is a good month for my Linux system

• After many months of waiting and several supposed and alleged deadlines missed, ATI finally released working drivers for Radeon cards on AMD64. It works just fine. Unreal Tournament 2004 runs beautifully, and once the numbskulls at CSN actually pay me my student loans, I'm very likely buying it.


• My printer works with CUPS. No idea what I did wrong before; I don't think I did anything really differently—but it works now.


• My scanner works! There was never a working SANE backend for it, and I had quite given up; I was searching eBay for a scanner that the compatibility list does claim has at least "good" support. Imagine my surprise when I cross-check with the compatibility list only to find that a newly written driver has not "basic", not "good", but "complete" support for the scanner I already own! And of course, this is how things should work. Knowing that I want the backend and frontend portions from the SANE project, I do the following:
  emerge sane-frontends sane-backends
  ... That's all it takes, and just like that, the Gimp picks up my scanner. Who said Linux wasn't user friendly?