Debian: day 3

In the last post, I detailed in broad strokes an investigation into whether Debian was a good fit for my software development work. The conclusion is that it's not perfect but neither is Windows 10 Pro or Windows Server 2019.

Then again, if you work as a solo-preneur you will also know that the software development part of your business isn't everything, you also need to be able to deal with your accountant, access email in a convenient fashion, talk to customers and maintain your server systems if you have one.

I do my accounting with Xero and it works well for me. Accessing Xero from Debian is exactly the same as Windows, so no change there. One change has been printing PDFs to sign for those processes that require a scanned signature. I had completely forgotten about the HP printer up in the lab and found myself without the ability to scan to a network folder, because I hadn't replicated the setup I had on Windows Server.

It's fairly simple to set up Samba and there are plenty of resources on the web for helping with that, so I won't bore you with the details. However, I did have to fiddle with the setup on the HP OfficeJet Pro 8740 I use. I ended up having to change the SMB settings on it to "SMB v1 CIFS". I am sure you can enable higher protocols on the Samba system but I just want to get stuff done.

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