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Sometimes you just need to go against the flow. Our shop included a traditional Windows®-based network of computers, printers and vinyl cutters.

Our shop is on a small ranch in the country. Although it's a wonderful lifestyle, it presents challenges. For example, a dial-up Internet connection serves as our lifeline to the outside world. This greatly limits our ability to upload the daily barrage of operating-system and virus updates. After we ignored a recent virus alert, we were promptly infected. The significant grief pushed us to look for alternatives. Our solution was to purchase a new Apple Macintosh to use as an Internet/e-mail portal.

Macintosh has never had a critical virus attack, so we felt that the expense justified avoiding the heartache of losing a key system for an extended length of time. So, you may ask, how does this concern signmaking? Well, this exercise pushed us to think about alternatives for signmakers who want to escape the Windows-only world. Remember, the Mac isn't the only alternative operating system. Many businesses are turning to Linux as a viable alternative to Windows servers or workstations. The inexpensive Linux software can be installed on as many systems as you desire.

The catch, of course, is that you need to be fairly proficient in Linux to properly install and configure a system. If you have, or can acquire, this knowledge, the reward is a bulletproof system that's much safer and cheaper to maintain than Windows. This idea intrigued us, so we obtained a copy of the Caldera printing-solution software. For many years, Caldera, a French company, has specialized in Macintosh high-end, digital-printing solutions. How To Install Daggerfall On Windows 7. They sent us a copy of their software for evaluation. Because we just bought the new Mac, it seemed like a natural fit. The VisualRIP family Caldera offers six different printing solutions that can cover most digital-printing needs.

Rather than cover all six, we'll describe the three product families. The entry-level products, which fall into the Copy family, allow you to perform scan-to-print, scan-to-file and scan-to-PDF functions. These products are primarily positioned for reproduction shops. The mid-range product line, the VisualRIP family, supports wide-format, digital printers. The VisualRIP family members are essentially the same base product with additional features. The big brother of the family is GrandRIP+. This product supports the features of VisualRIP, but also supports many grand-format printers.

All of the products in the family are supported on Mac OS X (up to 10.4, aka Tiger), Mandriva Linux 10, Sun Microsystems' Solaris 2.5.x (or higher), and SGI Irix 6.x or higher. Some of these industrial-strength systems offer outstanding performance. In most signshops, Mac OS is the most common alternative system, so that's what we chose to review at length. Let's take a look at VisualRIP for Mac OS X. Installation As we mentioned, this seemed like a great way to christen our new Macintosh. We received an evaluation copy of the Caldera software and decided to install and test VisualRIP because this would be a fairly typical choice for shops with digital-printing capabilities. Our system met the minimum recommended configuration of 1GB RAM, a G5 processor, more than 20GB disk space and Mac OS X.

Simple and advanced installation methods are available. To keep things easy, we chose the simple method. We were prompted for the software package we were loading. Then we answered questions concerning our system and the devices to support (Fig. The whole installation took less than 10 minutes. After the installation, we logged out of the admin' account and could see a new Caldera user was built.

We logged into this environment and saw a new desktop that displayed numerous Caldera shortcuts. Now it was time to try the software. VisualRIP in action As a rule, we usually read instructions thoroughly before trying out any new software. In this case, we received a fairly small manual that mostly covered the software's installation and configuration. We knew the documentation was loaded during the installation, but we decided to try to figure it out on our own. Mr Destiny Ita Download Movies. We double clicked a desktop icon named 'Caldera.'

We immediately were presented with two windows. A vertical window on the left side of the screen comprised a working directory where images could be placed. The other window comprised all of the applications, tools and settings for the RIP. From here, figuring out how things worked was pretty easy.