[plug] Fax/Modem Queries...

[Colin Rothnie]

> Trevor Phillips wrote:
> Has anyone had experience with Fax issues under Linux, esp. in a
small/home
> office environment? I'm going to start looking at efax and HylaFAX, but
any
> sage advice or quick recommendations would be appreciated. Ideally, being
able
> to "print" under Windows & Linux clients to a fax server is what we're
after.

I don't have any direct experience of setting up faxes.  However, in a
recent Linux Journal article (about six or eight months ago) there were
detailed instructions on setting up a fax server that could be printed to
from Windows.  (The author was the regular French writer, whose name I can't
currently recall).  There was reference to an open source program that ran
under Windows that allowed you to specify the fax number to be dialled when
you "printed" to the server.  As well, there were instructions for making a
web page to manage the fax queue.  I remember being almost sufficiently
enthused to try setting it up.

For incoming faxes, I think the image files can be converted to fairly small
little JPEGs or GIFs and emailed to a user.  I think Marcelle (or whatever
his name is) covers this in his article.

With regard to modems, try looking for an old hand-me-down 14.4 kb clunker
to do the job (I have one that I have been keeping in case I ever want to
set up a fax server).  To my knowledge, any speed beyond that will be
wasted.

Whenever I think about fax machines, I must admit, it just seems easier to
spend a few hundred dollars on a little dedicated unit and then never have
to worry about configuring software, working out how to scan hand written
pages pages that I want to send (with a signature for instance), networking
problems, CGI scripts ..... It just seems like too much work for the
potential benefits to me.  I obviously don't put sufficient value on
overcoming challenges.

Hope that helps
Colin Rothnie