DOT4 in printing explained

OK, now it's time to make a little mention on what the DOT4 thing is, when you talk about printers.

When you take a dive into HP windows drivers, you will most likely get to see the contents of it's .inf file soon. Almost every printer being listed there has a DOT4 text in parentheses somewhere at the end of the line. One could thing it would be a simple wikipedia search, but that gives you back an article about breaking fluid :-), then you search a couple of hours and you get there:

DOT4 port is a virtual port windows uses for communication with printers. In general, there is one port for each feature of the multi functional device. Printers usually need a driver that helps windows to structure the information for the printer in a way the printer understands. The data for the printer then flow through the certain DOT4 port that is responsible for the certain printer feature.

Happy printing!

Windows 8 remote desktop connection problem

Okay, this was a few hours I spent on discovering what the problem with the Remote Desktop Connection on a Windows 8 machine could be. I was trying to connect from Ubuntu 12.04 via the rdesktop tool. No success. I kept getting the "Unable to connect" message.

It felt a little weird as connecting to Windows 7 on the same netowrk was not a problem. Windows 8 is a new software, however. So you can expect new setups and tricks that you need to find a workaround for. After hours of trying different RDS, DHCP, firewall and other setups I realized the proclaimed Remote Desktop panel was missing in the System Properties -> Remote.

So I did a little search, and came across a very usable wiki page: [1], and found out that Windows 8 in a standard edition does not include Remote Desktop server capability. In case you need to connnect to your machine via RDS, you need to purchase Pro or Enterprise edition.

Oh well, isn't that the regular users needing computer professionals to connect to their computers in case of problems?



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8_editions#Comparison_chart



Thanks, microsoft. A little note in the menu would be handy.